A rescued Kemp's ridley sea turtle at the New England Aquarium Medical Center in Quincy, Mass., where it is undergoing medical rehabilitation. This year the usual trickle of stranded turtles on Massachusetts shores has turned into a flood, and nobody seems to know why.
WELLFLEET,
Mass. — For as long as anyone knows, young sea turtles have ventured up
the East Coast, leaving warm seas to feed on crabs and other prey. And
some of them have lingered too long in northern waters and been stunned
when the season turns cold.
Around
this time of year, volunteers regularly patrol the beaches of Cape Cod
Bay to rescue turtles that wash up at high tide — all six species of sea
turtles are endangered — so they can be rehabilitated and relocated to
warmer shores in the South.
But this year the usual trickle of stranded turtles has turned into a flood, and nobody seems to know why.
Since
mid-November, volunteers on turtle patrol have found nearly 1,200,
almost all young Kemp’s ridley turtles, the most endangered of the six
species. That is almost three times as many as in the previous record
year, and many more times the number in an average year. More turtles
are being found every day.
Most of them have survived, but hundreds have not.
The
stranded turtles, typically 2 to 3 years old and each of them between
the size of a dinner plate and a serving platter, have stretched the
abilities of the veterinarians and volunteers who rescued them, and the
capacities of aquariums as far away as Texas to care for the survivors
until they can be released.
Bob
Prescott, the director of the Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife
Sanctuary, who has been saving turtles for 32 years, said he had never
seen anything like it. When he started walking the beaches, he said, he
would find one or two turtles a season, warm them up and drive them to
the Boston airport himself. “I would go to Logan and give turtles to the
pilot of an Eastern Airlines jet,” he said. The pilot would keep the
turtle in the cockpit and hand it off to a turtle expert in Florida.
Not this year. “One day, 157 came in,” he said.
The
sanctuary now has about 150 volunteers to walk the beaches, help warm
the turtles and drive them to the New England Aquarium hospital in
Quincy for further care. The volunteers, using their own cars and vans,
put the turtles in empty cardboard banana cartons lined with donated
bath towels of every color.
Volunteers “hit every supermarket on the Cape” to get the banana boxes, Mr. Prescott said.
“I’m
at a loss for words,” said Connie Merigo, director of marine animal
rescue and rehabilitation at the aquarium, who is on the receiving end
of Mass Audubon’s work. At one point, the turtles were coming in so fast
that the aquarium set up a satellite recovery operation here in
Wellfleet.
“A
normal year would be 70 to 90,” she said last week. “We’re approaching
700.” Those are the live turtles. The Wellfleet sanctuary has hundreds
that did not make it. The bodies are stored to study over the winter.
At
the aquarium hospital, veterinarians and volunteers have been working
12- to 16-hour days since mid-November. They test the turtles for
dehydration, give some of them X-rays to see if they have pneumonia,
treat them with medication if necessary, and care for them while they
start swimming in baby pools and then graduate to larger ones. Each day
the turtles’ body temperatures are raised 5 degrees.
Now,
when the turtles are ready to move — to be released in Florida or held
in other aquariums until sea temperatures rise — one friendly pilot is
no longer enough. The Coast Guard flew 193 turtles to Florida in
November. Private planes have carried others. Staff members from the
National Aquarium in Baltimore drove some turtles from Boston. Every
aquarium on the East Coast has taken in some of them until they can be
released later.
“We’ve
called in all the favors we can,” Dr. Charles J. Innis, director of
animal health for the New England Aquarium, said last week. At the time,
there were about 200 turtles in various stages of recovery at the
animal hospital the aquarium built and staffed.
The
number of turtles stranded on Cape Cod Bay beaches has been increasing
for decades, perhaps because conservation efforts have been successful
for the Kemp’s ridley, perhaps because the ocean has warmed.
But
nothing suggested that a year like this would happen. Previous record
years were 1989, with about 100 stranded turtles; 1999, when 163 were
found; and 2012, with 413.
Over
the years, Mr. Prescott said, as the number of turtles rescued on the
Cape increased, those found on the north shore of Long Island decreased.
This year, only 23 had been found in New York by early December.
It
is tempting to speculate that a warming ocean may have something to do
with the change, Mr. Prescott said, but there is no proof of that.
"Cold-stunning
events are really hard things to explain,” said Selina Heppell, an
Oregon State University biologist who has been studying changes in the
Kemp’s ridley population for 20 years. “They are caused by local
conditions, such as sharp changes in temperature, but the role of
currents and turtle behavior and condition prior to the events are not
well understood.”
She
added: “The long-term effects of large events like this one are hard to
predict because we don’t know how many turtles actually died but were
not seen.”
The
number of Kemp’s ridley turtle nests reached a low of 702 in 1985, down
from 40,000 or more in the late 1940s, but it had been rising for
years, Dr. Heppell said, because of efforts to conserve the species’
primary nesting area in Mexico and a smaller one in Texas.
Nesting fell off in 2010, after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill
in the Gulf of Mexico. It rebounded in the next two years, but fell off
again in 2013 and 2014. Before the drop in nesting, Ms. Heppell said,
it seemed that the Kemp’s ridley population might grow enough that it
would come off the endangered list. About 11,500 nests were counted this
year, compared with 20,000 in 2011.
Scientific
studies of Kemp’s ridley turtles have concentrated on nesting, so the
lives of the young turtles who swim up the East Coast are less
understood. What is known, said Mr. Prescott, is that they often get
caught in Cape Cod Bay, as do dolphins and whales sometimes, because of
the shape of the land, or the currents and the tides.
“Cape
Cod Bay is a trap,” he said, and when the water temperature drops below
about 65 degrees, usually in mid-November, the turtles start showing up
on the beach.
The
rescue program, on the beach and in the aquarium, depends almost
entirely on volunteers, who work long hours, walk the beach in bitter
cold and take their commitments very seriously.
Bill
Allan, who patrols a beach in Eastham and supervises other volunteers,
scheduled a hip replacement in October so it would not interfere with
his work on diamondback terrapin hatchlings, which ends in September, or
the sea turtle rescue patrols later in the fall. By mid-November, when
there were four days of onshore winds that helped push the turtles
ashore, he was back on the beach.
“The
first day I kind of lost count after two dozen turtles.” He is
committed to the effort, he said, because “you’re the difference between
life and death” for the turtles.
Turtles
will continue to wash up on the bay beaches until the end of December,
although as the weather gets colder, fewer of them will survive.
Cold-stunned turtles that seem to be dead often recover, however, so
every turtle gets 24 hours during which it is presumed to be alive, even
if does not look it, Mr. Prescott said.
After
weighing and measuring one unmoving turtle before placing it in a
banana box, he insisted that revival was still a possibility.
“We don’t know that one’s dead until tomorrow,” he said.
