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Seventy Sea Turtles!
Jan. 14th, 2010 07:45 pmGraeme wanted to play baseball at the beach, so we loaded up into the car and drove to my favorite spot in Juno Beach, Florida right across the street from the Loggerhead Marinelife Center. It is both a hospital for injured and ill sea turtles as well as a research center. Juno Beach is one of the most densely nested sea turtle beaches in the world, providing hatching grounds for thousands and thousands (and thousands!) of Leatherback, Green, and Loggerhead turtle babies each summer.
We hadn't reached the beach when we saw quite a bit of commotion. A Disney World "Parade of Horses" 18-wheeler horse trailer was parked along the beachfront road, flanked by Fish & Wildlife Commission pickup trucks, police squad cars, and dozens of onlookers using their cell phones over their heads as cameras. I carried Graeme over and saw the back doors open in the trailer and the entire dim interior was teeming with sea turtles! It was shocking.
A corridor had been flanked off with string and volunteers from the Marinelife Center were taking turns carrying juvenile turtles down the steep dunes, across the wave-packed sands, and finally knee-deep into the surf where they were released and given a good push to help them on their way. Larger turtles were hauled off the truck by five and six volunteers at a time, loaded onto a flat-bed cart behind a four-wheeler, and driven close to the waterline for the release.
In total, over seventy sea turtles were helped back to the sea while I was there.
70!
It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Generally, if you happened to be around to see one turtle released it would cause celebration and cheers. Here, an unbelievable cargo waiting for their ride back home...a veritable parade of people carrying sea turtles into the waves.
You might be wondering, like I was, how something like that had happened. Turns out that with the unusually cold weather in Florida the last couple of weeks, an estimated 2500-3000+ sea turtles have gone into distress. As the water temperature dropped below 60 degrees, they were going into cold shock, developing pneumonia, and bobbing to the surface. They were washing up, lethargic or downright unresponsive, on beaches and bars all around the state. Every credentialed rescue and rehab center in Florida was suddenly receiving huge deliveries of ill, chilled turtles. The batch I got to watch return to the sea were housed and rehabilitated at Sea World and came from the even chillier waters around Cape Canaveral and the NASA Space Center. Now that the temperatures had climbed to the low 70s, healthy turtles from around the state are being released either on Juno Beach or just north of us at Hobe Sound. So those volunteers I saw have been releasing, on and off, for two days and doing emergency triage and working at over four times their facility's capacity for a week.
( News Video of Cape Canaveral Rescue and work at the Loggerhead Marinelife Center Under the Cut )
If you'd like to help the Marinelife Center, they're run entirely on donations. You can "adopt" sea turtles on their website or even have your name immortalized on one of their sea turtle-shaped bronze plaques at the hospital. They also handed out material wish lists to bystanders which I'll put behind the cut below.
( Wish List for Needed Supplies )
We hadn't reached the beach when we saw quite a bit of commotion. A Disney World "Parade of Horses" 18-wheeler horse trailer was parked along the beachfront road, flanked by Fish & Wildlife Commission pickup trucks, police squad cars, and dozens of onlookers using their cell phones over their heads as cameras. I carried Graeme over and saw the back doors open in the trailer and the entire dim interior was teeming with sea turtles! It was shocking.
A corridor had been flanked off with string and volunteers from the Marinelife Center were taking turns carrying juvenile turtles down the steep dunes, across the wave-packed sands, and finally knee-deep into the surf where they were released and given a good push to help them on their way. Larger turtles were hauled off the truck by five and six volunteers at a time, loaded onto a flat-bed cart behind a four-wheeler, and driven close to the waterline for the release.
In total, over seventy sea turtles were helped back to the sea while I was there.
70!
It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Generally, if you happened to be around to see one turtle released it would cause celebration and cheers. Here, an unbelievable cargo waiting for their ride back home...a veritable parade of people carrying sea turtles into the waves.
You might be wondering, like I was, how something like that had happened. Turns out that with the unusually cold weather in Florida the last couple of weeks, an estimated 2500-3000+ sea turtles have gone into distress. As the water temperature dropped below 60 degrees, they were going into cold shock, developing pneumonia, and bobbing to the surface. They were washing up, lethargic or downright unresponsive, on beaches and bars all around the state. Every credentialed rescue and rehab center in Florida was suddenly receiving huge deliveries of ill, chilled turtles. The batch I got to watch return to the sea were housed and rehabilitated at Sea World and came from the even chillier waters around Cape Canaveral and the NASA Space Center. Now that the temperatures had climbed to the low 70s, healthy turtles from around the state are being released either on Juno Beach or just north of us at Hobe Sound. So those volunteers I saw have been releasing, on and off, for two days and doing emergency triage and working at over four times their facility's capacity for a week.
( News Video of Cape Canaveral Rescue and work at the Loggerhead Marinelife Center Under the Cut )
If you'd like to help the Marinelife Center, they're run entirely on donations. You can "adopt" sea turtles on their website or even have your name immortalized on one of their sea turtle-shaped bronze plaques at the hospital. They also handed out material wish lists to bystanders which I'll put behind the cut below.
( Wish List for Needed Supplies )
