BEACHED TURTLE EUTHANIZED
700-pound animal found in distress on Norfolk’s East Beach
A 700-pound sea turtle that washed up on a Norfolk beach was euthanized following an assessment from the Virginia Aquarium’s Stranding Response Team.
NORFOLK — Alyssa Muhlendorf and her 10year-old daughter, Nyla, rushed out in their pajamas Monday morning when they heard a giant sea turtle was stranded on the shore of their East Beach neighborhood.
When they got to the beach, a small group had gathered around a leatherback turtle that came ashore during a rough high tide and hadn’t made it back to the water line.
“We both teared up when we saw her,” Muhlendorf said Tuesday of the turtle, which was likely a female weighing over 700 pounds. “We were awestruck.”
It soon became clear something wasn’t right. The group could see some blood on the turtle’s shell, and the creature spent hours walking in circles toward the bay. When it made it, the turtle didn’t seem to swim with intention, Muhlendorf said.
“She was flipped over by the waves … and eventually made it back to the beach.”
The Virginia Aquarium’s Stranding Response Team went out to help. After consulting with other agencies, the team made the “difficult decision” to euthanize the turtle, aquarium spokeswoman Natalie Sims said in an email.
“Due to the size and natural behavior of the species and this individual turtle’s behavior, the team made the humane decision to euthanize in order to not prolong suffering,” she said.
Before putting down the turtle, team members spent most of Monday monitoring the animal and trying to safely return it to the water. They first tried to euthanize it Monday afternoon but it became inaccessible.
Susan Barco, a senior scientist on the response team, said it’s not normal for leatherbacks to crawl on the sand except to lay eggs, which they typically do in more tropical climates like Florida or the Caribbean.
In the water Monday and Tuesday, the turtle kept swimming in circles. It appeared the creature was being carried mostly by wind from around 19th Bay Street to 1st Bay Street, Barco said.
“These are powerful swimmers. They should be able to handle some rough surf,” Barco said. “We feel confident the turtle was not going to survive in the
wild.”
By Tuesday morning, it had washed ashore again. The aquarium team administered a sedative, then lethal injection and used a crane on their truck to take the animal back to the facility for a necropsy to determine an official cause of death.
There were no major lesions that indicated a specific cause to the naked eye, Barco said.
Leatherbacks, t he world’s largest turtles, are deep divers in the open ocean and have a “notoriously poor record in any rehabilitation situation,” Barco said. They don’t maneuver well with their long front flipper and often “beat themselves up” on the walls of the tank. Taking the turtle from the bay was never part of the aquarium’s plan.
Leatherbacks can reach 7 feet long and weigh up to 2,000 pounds. They are considered a vulnerable species.
“These reptilian relics are the only remaining representatives of a family of turtles that traces its evolutionary roots back more than 100 million years,” according to National Geographic. “Once prevalent in every ocean except the Arctic and Antarctic, the leatherback population is rapidly declining in many parts of the world.”
There are only seven species of sea turtles worldwide and five of them swim in Virginia’s waters, according to the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. Most are loggerheads or Kemp’s ridley turtles.
Leatherbacks, named for their leathery shells, are less common. Six to 10 strand in the Chesapeake Bay each year, according to VIMS.
Since 2016, 26 leatherbacks have stranded in Virginia, according to Barco. Most of them get entangled in something and released.
This week’s was the second this year.
Barco said leatherbacks are highly susceptible to risks that come from humans: net entanglements, vessel collisions and eating plastic. They feast on jellyfish, and plastic can look like a good meal.
Muhlendorf said it was hard to reconcile her excitement over seeing such a majestic creature with the realization that she was only seeing it because it was in distress.
“It was like, ‘wow how lucky I am,’ but also the sadness,” she said. “It was the biggest gamut of emotions in a day that I have felt in a long time.”