Turtle Journal

Speaking over cell phone with the teachers, we learned that they had a fairly good handle on what constituted a sea turtle, but they were unsure of its species.  We asked that they remain with the animal while we sped to their location … about a 45 minute drive.  As we reached Chapin Beach, the tide was flooding across the tidal flats with a vengeance.  Two teachers were “escorting” the sea turtle in the shallows between sandbars.  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.  By size we could estimate its age at two to two and a half years old.  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.  But the cold-stunning season is still six or seven weeks in the future.

 

 

 

En route to the beach, we had alerted the New England Aquarium that we were responding to this potential sea turtle stranding.  Now we called them back with the species identification and our assessment of the animal’s condition.  There were early indications, beyond its lethargic behavior when first observed by the teachers, of the potential for future cold-stunning.  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.  There was a coating of algae on the top of the animal’s head and some algae buildup on the trailing edge of both front flippers.  There were a few dings on the keel as though it had been wave-tossed against a rock groin or breakwater.  When we observe turtles of this size during the outset of the cold-stunning season, we see the same, but much more extensive, indicators.  At least by the time we arrived on the scene, this sea turtle had become quite strong and active.

Rescued Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle (Story in Video)

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.  Based on our field assessment, the decision was made for us to release the animal into Nantucket Sound from a southern Cape Cod beach. 

We crated the sea turtle for transport in our Element.  (Thank the gods of science that field researchers always come equipped for field emergencies!)  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.  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 always document for sea turtles found in Cape Cod Bay.

 

 

 

Next we rendezvoused at the beach with a photographer from the Cape Cod Times whom we had alerted while driving from Dennis.  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.  By 3:15 in the afternoon we had released this fully charged sea turtle into the sound.  When we let it 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.”

 

 

 

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.  There has only been one other such happening several years ago of which I am personally aware.  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.  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.  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.  Or at least we hope that our successors in turtle conservation will see the fruit of today’s adventure in a couple of decades.  (ASIDE:  We’ve always considered it a bit unfair that sea turtles outlive sea turtle researchers.)

 

A hearty bravo to Nature’s Classroom without whose intelligent action this morning, nothing good would have come of today’s event.  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.  And that’s how we intend to save the world:  one turtle at a time.