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- [h=1]Unusually large loggerhead turtle found on Cape Cod[/h]
MASS AUDUBON WELLFLEET BAY WILDLIFE SANCTUARYThe adult loggerhead turtle weighed in at 279 pounds.
By Trisha ThadaniGLOBE CORRESPONDENT NOVEMBER 22, 2014
A 279-pound sea turtle was found on an Eastham beach Thursday, the largest hard-shell turtle in recent memory to be discovered after washing ashore in Massachusetts, wildlife officials said.
The adult loggerhead turtle was among hundreds of sea turtles that have washed ashore along Cape Cod in the past week, said Bob Prescot, director of the Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary.
Prescott said the loggerhead that was found Thursday “was very compromised in her ability to swim because she only has one good flipper,” Prescott said. “The other ones had been nibbled off, or bitten off at some point.”
The turtle died Thursday evening, New England Aquarium spokesman Tony LaCasse said. The cause has yet to be determined, he said.
An average adult loggerhead weighs about 250 pounds, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The last hard-shell turtle closest to that size that Mass Audubon has found washed ashore in the area was an adult loggerhead discovered in 1999, but it weighed almost 100 pounds less, Prescott said.
Soft-shell leatherback turtles that weighed as much as 700 pounds have been found washed up on Massachusetts shores, LaCasse said.
About 500 turtles have washed ashore along Cape Cod Bay this month, Prescott said. In the past few days, about 50 have washed up with each high tide, which he said was an unprecedented amount.
“This year we could double our previous record in 2012 of 413 turtles” for the entire year, Prescott said.
Prescott said the increase in the number of turtles washed ashore in Massachusetts can be explained by increased conservation efforts, and the fact that the Gulf of Maine is generally warmer than in the past.
“Instead of them stopping around New Jersey . . . or the southern tip of Cape Cod because the waters would be too cold farther up, now they are coming up past Boston and up into Canada,” Prescott said.
When the sun sets, the wind increases and the temperatures abruptly drop, and the turtles become slower and weaker against the tides — causing them to wash up on the Cape Cod Bay shoreline by the dozens, Prescott said.
Maggie Mooney-Seus, an NOAA spokeswoman, said it is unusual for a turtle as large as the loggerhead found on First Encounter Beach in Eastham Thursday to be affected by the colder waters.
“Typically, cold stunning affects smaller animals because they don’t have as much body mass,” she said. “A bigger animal, like a loggerhead, would have more body fat and deal with the cold better.”
Loggerheads washed ashore are typically much smaller, and are usually not seen until the end of November through December. Mooney-Seus said it is likely the animal’s damaged flippers played a large factor in it being washed ashore.
Volunteers from Mass Audubon gather turtles they discover on beaches and bring them to the society’s Wellfleet Bay sanctuary for evaluation and care until they are taken to the New England Aquarium, where they are cared for until they recover.
Although loggerheads are sometimes found in the area, finding an adult is unusual, Prescott said. About 80 percent of the turtles that wash up on shore have been Kemp’s ridley sea turtles, while the other 20 percent are either loggerheads or green sea turtles.
Prescott said the loggerhead turtle found by a volunteer Thursday was between 50 and 70 years old.
She was “a great old lady of the turtle world,” Prescott said.
Trisha Thadani can be reached at trisha.thadani@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @TrishaThadani
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COLD-WEATHER STRANDINGS
Cold-stunned turtles strand in record numbers
By Doug Fraser
dfraser@capecodonline.com
November 22, 2014 - 2:00 AM
WELLFLEET – Seated on the hard concrete floor of the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary’s maintenance barn, veterinarian Kelly Sattman lifted turtle No. 491 to eye level.
She pressed a small speaker that looked like an old transistor radio up to one ear while holding a sensor to the turtle’s neck.
Sattman tried to parse out the heartbeat from the white noise crackling from the speaker, and the roar of a heater struggling to keep the barn, set up as a turtle triage center on Friday, at 55 degrees.
“Any time buddy,” she urged. “Show them that you’re living.”
The count of recovered cold-stunned turtles was 520 on Friday, well past the 2012 record of 413. With survival rates at 80 percent, the sheer numbers of this year’s strandings taxed Audubon sanctuary staff and volunteers and overwhelmed the capacity of the New England Aquarium’s Quincy Animal Care Center, which can handle 70 turtles comfortably, and 120 in a pinch.
On Thursday, the aquarium was able to transport 20 turtles from Quincy to the National Marine Life Center in Buzzards Bay and another 31 were flown to a turtle rehab hospital in Georgia and to the South Carolina Aquarium. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries staff were also working to arrange air transport for those animals that had been stabilized.
The Quincy facility took 70 Friday, but with hundreds sitting in crates awaiting transport and treatment, the aquarium sent veterinarian Leslie Neville to Wellfleet Friday to begin treatment.
The metabolism of hypothermic sea turtles can be so depressed that their heartbeat slows to as low as one beat per hour.
It can be hard to tell the dead from the living, but No. 491, a 5-pound Kemp’s ridley taken off Cold Storage Beach in Truro on Thursday, had a heart that was virtually racing at 12 beats per minute. He, or she, (it’s hard to tell the sex of juveniles) was returned to a towel-lined banana crate, then loaded into volunteer driver Dave Horton’s car for the trip to Quincy.
Cotuit artist Anne Boucher had just delivered a painting to Provincetown on Tuesday when she heard about the turtle strandings and decided she’d stop by the Wellfleet Audubon sanctuary to help out. She never left, renting a room at an Eastham hotel, walking beaches from Wellfleet to Provincetown day and night. Friday morning, she pulled up at the front door of the sanctuary with a car filled with 17 turtles on front and back seats and in the trunk.
“When I was just on the beach, I was aware that if I stayed another 10 minutes there would probably be 10 more turtles,” Boucher said.
By the late afternoon, aquarium and Audubon staffs were setting up kiddie pools, filling them with water to rehydrate and gradually warm up the turtles. Sattman and Neville recorded statistics like heartbeat and weight that would help speed the process when the turtles reached Quincy.
At Sattman’s feet was a cardboard box of the not-so-fortunate sea turtles that had died. They were awaiting transport to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution where they would eventually be necropsied to study what factors may have contributed to their demise.
Unfortunately, the 278-pound loggerhead that was recovered off Cole Road Beach in Eastham Thursday died at the Quincy facility. It was the largest loggerhead to ever come ashore during one of these stranding events.
Aquarium spokesman Tony LaCasse said it was likely there were some underlying issues - disease, a gastric blockage due to plastic, or something else other than the cold that contributed to this huge animal washing up. Its vital signs were viable, he said.
“We’ll do a necropsy at a later time,” LaCasse said.
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