Volunteer network rescues hundreds of cold-stunned turtles on Cape Cod

Strandings grew tenfold since early 2000s as Gulf of Maine waters warm

The New England Aquarium’s Sea Turtle Hospital in Quincy, Massachusetts, treated dozens of turtles at a time through the winter months, according to aquarium veterinarian Kathy Tuxbury. By 5 August, only six remained, all with good prognoses. One of them, designated turtle #471 and named Lucky by the volunteer network, arrived at the hospital on 1 December in a banana box, hypothermic and suffering from pneumonia. The infection spread to a joint in its left flipper, requiring surgery — an operation performed by a board-certified orthopedic veterinary surgeon from Tufts University who donates his time, Tuxbury said.

The phenomenon driving these rescues is a shift in the Gulf of Maine’s seasonal temperatures, according to Kara Dodge, a research scientist at the aquarium who has spent 20 years studying New England sea turtles. “These turtles are very similar to what we call ‘snowbirds’ here in New England, where they come and spend the summer in Cape Cod,” Dodge said. “As the waters are staying warmer, longer, it may be that more and more of them are coming.”

The geography compounds the problem. The northern hook of Cape Cod extends about 65 miles into the Atlantic, trapping turtles that swim north for the summer. “If you look at it on a map, it’s a natural, geographic trap,” Dodge said. “And, for a sea turtle, their instinct is to swim south. So we’re a hotspot for mass stranding of sea turtles.”

The strandings begin in November and December, when ocean currents turn cold and turtles become trapped in shallow bays. Volunteers from the Massachusetts Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary patrol the beaches through the winter months, searching for animals in such severe cold shock that they often appear lifeless, said Audubon science coordinator Mark Faherty. The turtles can survive long periods in cold water but die quickly if stranded on a beach in freezing air, so the group monitors wind and tide forecasts and sometimes sends volunteers out at 1 a.m. with flashlights.

“Sometimes they’re walking the beaches at one in the morning into a freezing, cold wind,” said Faherty, who noted the group has some volunteers in their eighties who loyally patrol the longest, most remote stretches. Once collected, the turtles are driven to the aquarium by volunteers who keep their cars cool. “You have to maintain sort of a clinical environment in your car,” Faherty said. “They can’t blast their rock music, you know.”

At the hospital, staff conduct sea turtle triage: warming the animals slowly and reintroducing them to seawater over several days, said hospital director Adam Kennedy. Each receives radiographs and an exam; many are dehydrated or malnourished and need injected fluids and antibiotics, while others arrive with pneumonia from breathing cold ocean spray or with infections from being stranded. “Think of us as the emergency room for a big hospital,” Kennedy said. “We’re the emergency room and the ICU kind of all wrapped into one.”

Because the hospital can provide long-term care for only about 65 turtles at a time, the aquarium works with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to dispatch recovering turtles to partner rehabilitation centers up and down the East Coast and along the Gulf of Mexico as far west as Missouri, sometimes flown by volunteer pilots in private planes. “It’s an amazing network of sea turtle people,” Kennedy said. “And we all have one focus: which is to get the turtles back to the wild.”

For turtles that arrive alive, survival rates run about 85%, according to the aquarium. This year, staff drove 18 turtles south for spring releases in North Carolina; four more batches have been released from beaches on the south side of Cape Cod over the summer. A few of the animals receive satellite tags with antennas that researchers and members of the public can follow on the aquarium’s Sea Turtle Tracker, which documents migrations between nesting beaches in Mexico and feeding grounds as far north as Canadian waters.

Lucky, still too young for experts to determine its sex, was medically cleared for return to the wild on 11 August. The release is scheduled for 18 August from Cape Cod, with a tracker attached so researchers can monitor its migration. At the hospital, biologist Charlotte Clark — who started as a sea turtle intern and is now full-time staff — said every gram a specific turtle eats is recorded down to the last morsel, because each animal has its own dietary limit. “But these are wild animals; we don’t want them to associate with humans,” Clark said.

Intern Analya Stewart, 21, a biology major from Hampton University in Virginia, stood at the edge of a 6,000-gallon seawater tank mushing squid into its juices, then tossing it toward a specific turtle and quickly netting back any pieces the animal wouldn’t take. “When I got here I was a bit taken aback,” Stewart said. “But it has been a great experience.”