{"id":276,"date":"2008-09-05T22:00:17","date_gmt":"2008-09-06T02:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/?p=276"},"modified":"2008-09-29T22:38:24","modified_gmt":"2008-09-30T02:38:24","slug":"saving-a-critically-endangered-sea-turtle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/?p=276","title":{"rendered":"Saving a Critically Endangered Sea Turtle"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Nature’s Classroom Teachers Find Endangered Sea Turtle<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In keeping with the theme of this web site, “Saving the World One Turtle at a Time,” opportunity came knocking across the ether at 11:30 this morning.\u00c2\u00a0 Five teachers from Nature’s Classroom (http:\/\/www.naturesclassroom.org\/Yarmouth.htm<\/a>) had traveled to Chapin Beach in Dennis for field orientation on the last day before school\u00c2\u00a0resumes next week.\u00c2\u00a0 They spotted an apparently lethargic\u00c2\u00a0“sea turtle” in a shallow tidal pool.\u00c2\u00a0 While most folks would have walked on by figuring that the incoming tide would handle the situation, or while someone else might have made the absolutely wrong choice of tossing the turtle into the sea to fend for itself, the Nature’s Classroom teachers took action.\u00c2\u00a0 They called the sea turtle stranding center at Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary (508-349-2615) to report the sighting.\u00c2\u00a0 The sanctuary called us and the game was afoot.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

Speaking over cell phone with the teachers,\u00c2\u00a0we learned that they had a fairly good handle on what constituted a sea turtle, but they were unsure of its species.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0We asked that they remain with the animal while we sped to their location … about a 45 minute drive.\u00c2\u00a0 As we reached Chapin Beach, the tide was flooding across the tidal flats with a vengeance.\u00c2\u00a0 Two teachers were “escorting” the sea turtle in the shallows between sandbars.\u00c2\u00a0 A brief look was enough to identify the animal as a Kemp’s ridley, one of the rarest and most critically endangered sea turtles in the world.\u00c2\u00a0 By size\u00c2\u00a0we could estimate its age at two to two and a half years old.\u00c2\u00a0 In other words, this animal was the typical juvenile sea turtle that we find cold-stunned on Cape Cod beaches from late October to December.\u00c2\u00a0 But the cold-stunning season is still six or seven weeks in the future.<\/div>\n
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Don Lewis Holds Rescued Juvenile Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n
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En route to the beach,\u00c2\u00a0we had alerted the New England Aquarium that\u00c2\u00a0we were\u00c2\u00a0responding to this potential sea turtle stranding.\u00c2\u00a0 Now we called them back with the species identification and\u00c2\u00a0our assessment of the animal’s condition.\u00c2\u00a0 There were early indications, beyond its lethargic behavior when first observed by the teachers, of the potential for future cold-stunning.\u00c2\u00a0 The right rear quadrant of its carapace was covered with brown algae; algae was also beginning to form on the rear of the turtle’s plastron.\u00c2\u00a0 There was a coating of algae on the top of the animal’s head and\u00c2\u00a0some algae buildup\u00c2\u00a0on the trailing edge of both front flippers.\u00c2\u00a0 There were a few dings on the keel as though it had been wave-tossed against a rock groin or breakwater.\u00c2\u00a0 When we observe turtles of this size during the outset of the cold-stunning season, we see the same, but much more extensive, indicators.\u00c2\u00a0 At least by the time we arrived on the scene, this sea turtle\u00c2\u00a0had become\u00c2\u00a0quite strong and active.<\/div>\n
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Rescued Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle (Story in Video)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In conversations with the aquarium and by proxy with NOAA, we weighed three options: immediate release on site, medical examination at New England Aquarium, or immediate release on the southern side of Cape Cod into Nantucket Sound … so that it wouldn’t get trapped by cold waters within the bay and become hypothermic and cold-stun a month of so hence.\u00c2\u00a0 Based on our field assessment, the decision was made for us to release the animal into Nantucket Sound from a southern Cape Cod beach.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

We crated the sea turtle for transport in our Element.\u00c2\u00a0 (Thank the gods of science that field researchers always come equipped for field emergencies!)\u00c2\u00a0 We began the trek across the Cape with a short stop to visit with our friend & colleague Kara Dodge, currently a PhD candidate at UNH and formerly a NOAA sea turtle coordinator.\u00c2\u00a0 She had flipper and PIT tags to append and to insert, and it gave us a nice quiet space to acquire the morphometric information we\u00c2\u00a0always document for sea turtles found in Cape Cod Bay.<\/div>\n
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Don Lewis Reads Caliper and Kara Dodge Records Data<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n
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Next we rendezvoused at the beach with a photographer from the Cape Cod Times whom\u00c2\u00a0we had alerted while driving from Dennis.\u00c2\u00a0 With sea turtle stranding season only a few weeks in the future, we didn’t want to miss this opportunity to use a photo-op to make people aware of what’s coming and what they should do and who they should contact.\u00c2\u00a0 By 3:15 in the afternoon we had released this fully charged sea turtle into the sound.\u00c2\u00a0 When\u00c2\u00a0we let\u00c2\u00a0it go into the oncoming surf, the turtle exploded forward like a hotrod leaving salt spray rather than rubber as it accelerated from zero to sixty faster than you could say, “Kemp’s ridley.”<\/div>\n
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Release of Rescued Kemp’s Ridley into Nantucket Sound<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n
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Finding a Kemp’s ridley sea turtle in Cape Cod Bay other than on the beach during the cold-stunning season is an extremely rare event.\u00c2\u00a0 There has only been one other such\u00c2\u00a0happening several years ago of which I am personally aware.\u00c2\u00a0 In that case the decision was made to tag it and release it back into Cape Cod Bay with an extremely unsatisfactory outcome a month or so later.\u00c2\u00a0 This time we maximized the odds that one of the most critically endangered species would have one more juvenile turtle to grow into adulthood and help restore its population.\u00c2\u00a0 We hope to see this turtle’s flipper tags or detect its PIT tag on a nesting beach in Rancho Nuevo, Mexico in another 15 or 20 years.\u00c2\u00a0 Or at least we hope that our successors in turtle conservation will see the fruit of today’s adventure in a couple of decades.\u00c2\u00a0 (ASIDE:\u00c2\u00a0 We’ve always considered it a bit unfair that sea turtles outlive sea turtle researchers.)<\/div>\n
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A hearty bravo to Nature’s Classroom without whose intelligent action this morning, nothing good would have come of today’s event.\u00c2\u00a0 And thanks also to a team of dedicated volunteers and professionals from Mass Audubon, the New England Aquarium, UNH and NOAA who responded to the challenge, made the best decision for the animal’s survival and flawless executed its impromptu rescue and release.\u00c2\u00a0 And that’s how we intend to save the world:\u00c2\u00a0 one turtle at a time.<\/div>\n
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Don Lewis Releases Endangered Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nature’s Classroom Teachers Find Endangered Sea Turtle In keeping with the theme of this web site, “Saving the World One Turtle at a Time,” opportunity came knocking across the ether at 11:30 this morning.\u00c2\u00a0 Five teachers from Nature’s Classroom (http:\/\/www.naturesclassroom.org\/Yarmouth.htm) had traveled to Chapin Beach in Dennis for field orientation on the last day before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[23],"tags":[167,169,95,175,162,176,156,163,171,161,172,183,178,107,160,159,185,180,170,155,164,108,154,174,179,153,24,109,182,165,166,177,36,157,158,10,181,110,168,173,184,103],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=276"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":287,"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions\/287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}