Four Stranded Sea Turtles in First Twenty-Four Hours
— 25 October 2003
While winds dropped off last evening, they must have pushed several cold-stunned sea turtles close enough to shore that the new moon flood tides at midnight yesterday and noon today brought three more Kemp’s ridleys onto the beaches of Orleans and south Eastham. All juveniles, roughly two years of age, our four stranded sea turtles in the first 24-hours have ranged from 21.3 to 27.5 centimeters long and from 1.6 to 3.2 kilograms in weight.
The morning dawned with a thick coasting of frost on the pumpkins, yet by midday temperatures were beginning to nudge 50 under clear skies and bright sunshine. So, the turtles recovered from the beach early this morning, presumably deposited with the midnight high tide, had a chilly wait for rescuers. The first one (see picture below) arrived with an internal body temperature of 37.7 degrees Fahrenheit. The second, about an hour later, had warmed to 40.5 degrees. And the third turtle of the day (above) had a core temperature of 44.9 degrees, “baking” under the morning sunlight.
  The second turtle of the day brought along a veritable reef of life onto shore. Its shell was heavily encrusted with algae and coated with a think layer of skeleton shrimp. Almost Indian Jones in its visual effects, the whole carapace seemed to move in and out of focus as the shrimp hopped and rolled through the seaweed.
By mid morning the first ridley from yesterday afternoon and two from this morning were packed into a volunteer vehicle and speeding toward New England Aquarium for intensive medical care and the road to rehabilitation. This afternoon’s ridley is en route to Boston as I type. A good, although an early and rather more intense beginning for the sea turtle stranding season than we had expected. We expect them to arrive with the first storm after 1 November. Well, turtles never could read the calendar. And we expect the first sea turtles to arrive in ones and twos — not four in the first 24-hours. Still, we have four rather lively Kemp’s ridleys, the rarest and most critically endangered sea turtle in the world. Because they arrived so early, before the weather turns really cold, they have a great chance of making it through the long rehabilitative process and back into the wild where they can play an important role in reversing the decline of this endangered species.
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