A 7-foot endangered ocean-going sea turtle, which rarely strands alive, is clinging to life at the New England Aquarium’s Marine Animal Care Center in Quincy, MA. The seven foot long, 655 pound leatherback sea turtle was found just as darkness fell Wednesday night on a mud flat in Pamet Harbor in Truro, MA, near the tip of Cape Cod.



Staff from the Mass Audubon Sanctuary at Wellfleet Bay located and identified the huge, black, sea-going turtle as daylight faded. Given the remote location, darkness and an incoming tide, rescue efforts were postponed until the morning. Mass Audubon then contacted the New England Aquarium’s Marine Animal Rescue Team, which rehabilitates hundreds of sea turtles each year. However, live leatherback stranding are extremely rare with the Aquarium only handling five leatherbacks on Massachusetts beaches in more than 40 years.

Early Thursday morning, Mass Audubon staff re-located the turtle a few hundred yards from the nearest road access. With the assistance of a dolphin stranding transport cart from the Cape Cod-based International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), Mass Audubon and IFAW staff with local volunteers moved the one third ton reptile to an IFAW vehicle. Thursday morning, Aquarium biologists met the rescuers on the Cape and took over care of the skinny, male turtle as they transported to the Aquarium’s new Marine Animal Care Center in the former Quincy Shipyard.



There, he was evaluated by the Aquarium’s veterinarians including Dr. Charles Innis, who is one of the leading authorities on the medical care of turtles. The lethargic, seven foot long turtle at 655 pounds is actually underweight, although not emaciated. Leatherback sea turtles are among the world’s largest reptiles, and adults commonly weigh in excess of 1000 pounds. Rescue staff drew blood to evaluate the animal’s health and started administering drugs to treat it for dehydration, trauma and shock.

Leatherbacks are open ocean sea turtles that migrate thousands of miles and consequently have enormous front flippers to pull their giant bodies through the water. Aquarium medical staff immediately noticed the turtle’s unfortunately distinctive left front flipper that was about a foot and a half shorter than the three foot long right one. About 40 percent of that paddle was gone due to some kind of recent trauma. Most of the wound had healed over, but Dr. Innis felt that the injury had probably occurred this season.



Sea turtles often lose parts of flippers to sharks or other large predatory fish and can still survive. However, the line of the avulsed tissue on the flipper was very straight. That led some Aquarium staff  to wonder if the trauma might have occurred from a flipper entanglement in a vertical line in the water such as to a lobster pot or a boat mooring. Such entanglements are unfortunately quite common and along with recreational boat strikes are the two leading sources of death for this endangered species in New England waters. Officials are still counting and double checking reports but fear that more than twenty of the endangered leatherbacks have died in the region this summer.

Leatherbacks migrate up the East Coast each June to feed on abundant sea jellies (jellyfish) in Massachusetts waters, particularly around the Cape and the Islands. They will migrate south for the winter in September and October.

After its intake exam, Aquarium staff wrapped a large, Velcro harness around the turtle before placing it in a large tank. The harness was attached to a rope which was always handled by a person with the mandate of keeping the turtle from swimming into one of the tank walls. Being entirely ocean going, leatherbacks never encounter barriers in the sea that they cannot swim around. The harness was designed by New England Aquarium staff as a technique to avoid further injury to the turtle.

Aquarium biologists and veterinarians are working overnight and constantly monitoring the giant turtle in the hopes of trying to save it but are also hoping to learn more about leatherbacks first hand in this very, very rare opportunity. The animal’s prognosis is poor as in order to strand, it had to become critically ill. However, the New England Aquarium’s rescue and veterinary staff are among the most skilled and experienced in the world at rehabilitating sea turtles.

The rescue and treatment has been covered in local media. Check out reports by NECN, WCVB Channel 5, The Patriot Ledger and The Cape Cod Times.

MORE ABOUT LEATHERBACK SEA TURTLES FROM AQUARIUM BLOGS
A leatherback stranded just last year. While it did not survive, learn about the rescue team's valiant effort to save the turtle. Learn how rescue teams around New England practice disentangling leatherback sea turtles from fishing line, an all-too-common occurrence. Finally, meet a nesting leatherback our rescue team encountered in the wild during a rescue expedition to Florida.

Marine Animal Rescue Team biologists examine a stranded leatherback turtle on a Cape Cod beach.

DENNIS AND QUINCY, MA—A 400-pound, endangered leatherback sea turtle died of complications from severe entanglement wounds at the New England Aquarium’s Animal Care Center in Quincy Sunday. It had been rescued from Crow’s Pasture Beach in Dennis late Saturday afternoon. The sub-adult female was found on  Cape Cod beach minimally responsive. The sea turtle had severe, deep, rotting wounds at the base of each of its front flippers. These are the type of injuries commonly found when sea turtles get one of their large, paddle-like flippers caught around a vertical line in the water.  Such ropes are most commonly from boat mooring lines or fixed fishing gear like lobster pots. This turtle had either freed itself or was cut out of the entanglement by a person. Unfortunately, such entanglements happen every year in the waters around Cape Cod, which abuts a major seasonal migratory route for these black, soft-shelled giants.

The New England Aquarium’s Marine Animal Rescue Team responded mid-afternoon on Saturday. They were greeted by Dennis Murley of the Massachusetts Audubon Sanctuary at Wellfleet Bay. Mass Audubon provides first responder services for  stranded sea turtles on the Cape. Aquarium rescue biologists and veterinarians found the animal still alive but barely breathing on its own. The animal was thin, not reactive to people and had terrible, large flipper wounds that had dying tissue on them and were probably at least a couple of weeks old. Aquarium staff administered emergency medications and fluids. With the aid of volunteers, the town of Dennis’s natural resources and animal control staff, and biologists from the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the 400-pound turtle was carried through the loose sand by 14 people to the Aquarium’s emergency vehicle.

The leatherback is examined at the Aquarium's Animal Care Center in Quincy.

It was then transported to the Aquarium’s new off-site holding and treatment facility in the Quincy Shipyard. Aquarium staff continued intensive treatment, and chief veterinarian Dr. Charles Innis and senior biologist Kerry McNally attended to the leatherback overnight.

Rescue team members give the leatherback turtle hydrotherapy.

In the early morning, the animal’s already poor vital signs deteriorated, and she passed away relatively quickly.  A necropsy later on Sunday revealed abnormality in her organs. Whether this was a result of the infections in her severe wounds was not known. Tissue samples were taken for further pathology testing.

Leatherback sea turtles are the world’s largest turtle and the largest reptile by weight. This animal at 400 pounds was not yet reproductively active. Adult leatherbacks in Massachusetts waters commonly weigh 600 to 1,000 pounds. They are seasonal visitors here arriving during the summer and early autumn to feed exclusively on sea jellies. They commonly migrate up the East Coast in late June and pass between southern Cape Cod and the Islands. The autumn migration normally begins later in September, although turtles that had traveled deep into Gulf of Maine waters do pass by southward later in the autumn.

There are 10 fewer mouths to feed at the Aquarium today, and the Marine Animal Rescue Team couldn’t be happier. Yesterday the team released 10 critically endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtles at Dowses Beach in Osterville. They have been being rehabilitated at the Aquarium since they were rescued on Cape Cod beaches late last fall.



Each summer, Kemp’s ridleys migrate up the East Coast to Cape Cod Bay to feed, and each fall as the water cools they head south again. But each year, many of the sea turtles are trapped in the arm of the Cape; as the water gets colder, the sea turtles’ body temperature drops and they become lethargic and weak. The wind and waves wash many of these turtles onto the shore, where volunteers from Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary collect the animals and bring them to the Aquarium.

The sea turtles are usually suffering from hypothermia and pneumonia and sometimes also have cuts, abrasions and cracks in their shells caused by fishing gear or boat propellers.

Read about the treatments and procedures that the Marine Animal Rescue team and the veterinary staff perform when the turtles arrive at the Aquarium in this post and by browsing all of the posts on the Marine Animal Rescue blog.

You can read more about the release in this post.

See video of the turtles' release on NECN's website.