A sea turtle hospital in Massachusetts is helping stranded loggerhead, Kemp’s ridley and green turtles return to the ocean.
In this Tuesday, March 12, 2019 photo, a loggerhead turtle swims in a tank at a marine animal rehabilitation center near Boston. Warmer waters in New England are proving attractive to sea turtles, but with a catch. Many are swimming north only to be trapped by cooling waters.
The number of warm water turtles stuck on beaches here has risen dramatically in the past decade, according to the Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary. This year, volunteers recovered 829 helpless turtles washed up on the sand — about half of them dead including some frozen solid. That’s nearly twice what they found in 2016 and 10 times more than in 2008.
In the past decade, many turtles have been moving farther northward from the Gulf of Mexico into the warming waters of the Gulf of Maine to feed on crabs, mussels and shrimp.in the PLOS ONE journal in January concluded there were more strandings of endangered Kemp’s ridley turtles in years with warmer sea-surface temperatures.
They say the spike is a sign that sea turtle populations have done better over the past decade due to greater protections. Sea turtles have been decimated by development, destruction of nesting sites and accidently being caught in commercial fishing nets. “They know they have to leave but the Cape is like a trap — a hook within a hook,” Bob Prescott, the director of the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary and a co-author on the PLOS ONE paper.
Volunteers take them in cardboard boxes to the turtle hospital in Quincy — with car temperatures in the 50s to avoid shocking them.
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