Saving the Turtles

Here is a green turtle on a quilt I made a few years ago for these amazing people, the Meylans, the only famous herpetologists I know. (Actually, I don't know any other herpetologists.) And here is a portrait of the heroes, Peter, Anne and Stephan.

In this beginning of the new year we had such a dreadful freeze that decimated crops and gardens in Florida we could hardly keep abreast of the magnitude of the stress in all our wildlife. When Anne and Peter and their sons came for a visit today they were full of the heroic stories about how the sea turtles of Florida were saved after the freeze.

Some four to five thousand sea turtles, mostly green turtles, but some loggerheads, were in terrible distress from the cold. Many were dying and the living ones were cold stunned and lying listless in the sea grass mats near shore and in the estuaries.

Peter Meylan, a professor at Eckerd College, enlisted the help of students in his reptile class. They went north to the Panama City area, where with the help of government and environmental groups and volunteers who scoured the lagoons and weed mats, they rescued many turtles, bringing them to the Gulfworld Aquarium in Panama City to warm up before release.

Meanwhile Anne Meylan from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation, and her son Stephan (on winter break from college) needed to take 92 cold stunned turtles from Pinellas to Ocala and the Wakala fish hatchery where they had the tanks to revive the turtles. On their wild ride to Ocala with the turtles they described having those huge hundred pound turtles barging around the floor of the van, getting under their feet, lunging everywhere.

After their turtle drop off near Ocala, they went to Merrit Island where there were hundreds of sea turtles, also cold stunned. Here, NASA let the sea turtle rescue operation use the NASA orbitor warehouse where there was a warmer. Seaworld, Disney, and others helped with their resources. There were lots of veterinarians who helped in the tagging and getting blood samples for genetic testing. Many of the turtles had fibropapiloma tumors, a contagious condition, and these turtles had to be separated from the healthy ones. This was the first time Stephan had had to do really fast work to pit tag these huge sea turtles. (This is the same thing we do to microchip our dog and cat pets.) The rescue operation painted numbers on each turtle after tagging. This took days and cold nights warmed by adrenalin, no doubt.

After warming and the data gathering, the turtles were released into the sea again. The dead ones had to be taken to the dump. Anne spoke of the steady volunteers who helped with this awful chore.

I have probably made mistakes in the telling of this. But what I know is that many many folks here in Florida stepped up to save a huge population of sea turtles. Eighty-five percent of them were saved!)

The Meylans are exhausted. We fed them a supper of rice and beans and listened to their stories.

The best stuff one ever does in life is responding to crisis. We Americans are so good at this. There are legions of ordinary folks who trundle off to New Orleans to rebuild houses, or cook for the homeless, or save manatees, or go to third world nations to repair cleft palates or fistulas. We take simple stoves and water purification and bed nets to places in need of these things. We believe that thing by thing, one by one, we can make a difference. And we do.

But we must also think over the long haul. We cannot just respond to a crisis, and this is certainly good. For Haiti we need to keep on giving in a responsible way after the water and food crisis abates.

We are global, we are our neighbors.