Sea Turtle Emergency

A lazy Sunday morning in Porto dos Barcos, turned into a sea turtle emergency almost at the drop of a hat. I had been lounging in my hammock for a post-breakfast snooze with nothing seemingly to do since the tide was too early or too late in the day for seahorse research (5 AM or 5:30 PM), when Glais (head of the Fishing Cooperative) came in to get me and said there were sea turtles down on the dock. I, thinking this would be a cute photo-op grabbed my camera, wondering if the turtles would still be there in the water once I got down to the dock.

However, my whole concept of sea turtles down at the dock was horrifyingly wrong. What I saw when I got to the dock were three sea turtles, out of the water, lying on their backs, bleeding. To my shock, astonishment and horror nobody seemingly was doing anything about it and some of the kids were poking at the turtles as they flailed about.

There was a fishermen standing nearby and I tried to gather information from him. He had caught them in his fishing net and he was trying to get a hold of the sea turtle group (Project Tamar), located in the next town, but of course the cell service was down in Porto dos Barcos at that moment. He instructed me to take pictures of the turtles and even wanted his picture taken with a turtle much to my astonishment. The marine biologist inside of me was horrified. These turtles were baking out in the sun and nobody seemingly knew what to do. I remembered the posters, campaigns, classes and experience I had in sea turtles, and quickly moved the sea turtles from the sunny dock into the shade by a tree. I instructed a boy to go and get me a bucket of sea water to help keep these guys cool and asked Glais to go get me some towels. Since the phone service was down, Glais suggested we flag down a truck and have someone drive them to Project Tamar. That sounded like a good idea to me, and with my knowledge that they needed to be covered with wet towels, shading their eyes and shells for the journey, I knew I could get those turtles safely to Amofala (the next town) and into the caring hands of the sea turtle vet.

I quickly rushed home to change into field clothes while Glais flagged down a truck. I ran back, thinking I really needed one other person to come with me to keep these turtles nice and cool and well-behaved in the back of the truck. But it’s Brazil, and nothing goes as planned, so once the truck got there, I had a teenage guy help me load the turtles into the back of the truck. All three turtles got placed on their backs in the truck, leaving me to try and right them, and cover them with the wet blankets as the truck started moving. Let me say trying to be an operational vet / marine biologist / sea turtle emergency responder in the back of a flat bed truck down bumpy dirt roads with speed bumps and a couple of crates sliding around the back of the truck isn’t easy. The littlest turtle, was quite happy to be on his stomach and quite content to lay happily (seemingly) in the corner of the truck and not move too much. The loggerhead turtle and the larger hawksbill both proved to be difficult. The hawksbill who I flipped over onto his stomach second, proceeded to try and crawl all over the back of the truck from the second I turned him over making it difficult to keep the towel over his head. I had to resort to holding him and the towel in one place as the loggerhead slid around the back of the truck at least with the towel covering his head.

The journey seemed endless. Ok it didn’t. But as I was also sliding around the back of the truck, trying not to be bitten by the turtles who were unhappily out of the water and injured, I thought the 5 KM ride was taking quite a long time. When we got to Project Tamar, the sea turtle vet came out with a wheel barrel and we took one sea turtle in at a time from the back of the truck into the covered pools used to treat injured turtles. I guess that Sunday morning had been quite busy and two other sea turtles had also been brought in, accidentally captured by fishermen. Project Tamar seemed under-staffed, as there was one vet for all these turtles, and the two interns assigned to her for the day didn’t know how to pick up and move the turtles safely from the truck to the wheel barrel, or even how to secure them for the wheel barrel ride. Once again I happily lent a hand, and realized that this was what I liked about being a marine biologist; being able to spontaneously help out with injured marine creatures. It made me remember the Seinfeld episode where George says he’s the marine biologist to impress a woman and then they stumble upon a beached whale. Well I chuckled to myself, I’m glad I had more training than George Castanza for this one. I went back to check on my turtles a few days later, and all are still alive! I’m not sure if they’ll stay that way, or if they might wind up captured in a fishing net another day, but I feel proud that I can say I helped save three sea turtles today. One day at a time, one sea turtle at a time, one seahorse at a time- that’s all it takes to make a difference.