Hundreds of baby sea turtles rescued after washing ashore in South Africa
An aquarium in South Africa is stretched beyond capacity after more than 500 baby sea turtles were washed up on beaches by a rare and powerful storm and rescued by members of the public.
The little turtles are mostly endangered loggerheads and should be cruising the ocean. Most of them instead will spend the first few months of their lives in newly built plastic tanks at the Turtle Conservation Centre at the Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town. The aquarium is rehabilitating about 400 of the roughly 530 sick and injured turtles that were brought in, while sending the rest to two other aquariums to spread the load.
Baby turtles have to fend for themselves from the moment they hatch on beaches and make their way to the ocean.
In South Africa, loggerheads hatch on the northeastern coast on the far side of the country from Cape Town. The turtles were likely sucked in by the warm Indian Ocean Agulhas Current, carried around the tip of South Africa and spat out in the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean near Cape Town.
That’s fairly common, said Talitha Noble-Trull, head of the Turtle Conservation Centre, who is in charge of treating the new arrivals.
What isn’t normal is the powerful storm that recently hit the Cape Town area.
The conservation centre usually receives a few to maybe 100 stranded young turtles in the three to four months after hatching season.
“What we haven’t seen before is over 500 turtles in two weeks,” Noble-Trull said.
She estimated that each turtle will cost $500 US to get back to full strength before being released into the warmer Indian Ocean in a few months. The Turtle Conservation Centre has brought in a small army of volunteers to help the aquarium’s fulltime staff care for them.
While the storm was a major shock to the turtles, who are vulnerable to extreme weather and climate change, it has given Noble-Trull and other conservationists a valuable insight into another increasingly common danger.
Many of the turtles had ingested small pieces of plastic, which left their systems after they arrived at the aquarium.
Turtles spend almost all their lives in the ocean and because of that, they’re “ocean indicators,” Noble-Trull said.
“Little bits of soft plastic, little bits of hard plastic are floating all along the oceans and turtles are eating them. So, for us it’s very important to be collecting and capturing this data. Because these turtles are coming at us with a message. They’re not telling us. They’re shouting it at us. That our oceans are not a safe place for turtles.”