Wildlife center’s opening comes at vital time
Site boosts capacity for rescues, research
Arthur was found along a road in Austin, covered in so many ticks that the baby North American river otter hardly had any blood.
Goose, an orphaned bottlenose dolphin calf, was dehydrated and suffering from a respiratory infection when he was rescued near Goose Island State Park.
Both animals — along with Champ the turtle with only three flippers, Storm the seabird covered in cactus spines and some 1,600 sea turtles stunned by the cold temperatures of Winter Storm Uri — were taken to a small metal building in Corpus Christi where the Texas State Aquarium had focused its rescue and rehabilitation efforts since 2010.
But starting this week, displaced and wounded coastal animals will be taken to the $16 million Port of Corpus Christi Center for Wildlife Rescue, which opened Thursday on the Texas State Aquarium’s main campus. This facility, the largest coastal wildlife rescue center in Texas, will enable the aquarium’s staff to care for more animals and to research how these animals and their habitats could become more resilient.
The research portion is the future of this program, said Jesse Gilbert, CEO and chief biologist for the Texas State Aquarium Association.
“The need for wildlife rescues in the Coastal Bend, in the Corpus Christi area, has been growing,” Gilbert said. “It doesn’t do us a lot of good to rehabilitate these animals and put them back into habitats that can’t support them.”
Between 2005 and the end of last year, the aquarium’s wildlife rescue program had admitted 8,795 marine mammals, sea turtles and birds (the center opened in 1995 but doesn’t have records that far back). Of those, 4,145 animals were released back into the wild.
More animals have been needing help in recent years due to extreme weather and an overall larger animal population, Gilbert said.
Each of the last five years has brought cold-stunned sea turtles to the aquarium’s wildlife
rehabilitation center. Prior to that, Gilbert could count on one hand the number of times the Gulf of Mexico dipped below 50 degrees Fahrenheit and caused turtles to become lethargic and unable to swim.
In addition, there was Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and Hurricane Hanna in 2020 that blew seabirds off course and scattered debris along the aquarium’s campus. The summer of 2020 also had an unusual alignment of high tides and high winds that pushed turtles into jetties.
“We are definitely experiencing a more dynamic weather pattern,” Gilbert said.
Hamming it up
Turtles are common patients at the wildlife rescue center, with 421 admitted last year and 1,636 admitted in 2021 (the year of Winter Storm Uri). But the staff also helps dolphins, otters, American alligators and birds of prey, such as owls and hawks.
Most of these animals don’t get names since they’re returned to the wild. But some critters are too sick or rescued too young and cannot be returned to their natural habitats. That’s what happened with Arthur, the otter covered in ticks. He was resilient and loveable — basking in the staff ’s attention and hamming it up for the cameras — but he wasn’t a wild otter.
“He was young enough that he never learned how to be an otter,” Gilbert said.
Arthur has a permanent home at the Texas State Aquarium.
Goose, the orphaned dolphin, was bottle-fed when he entered the aquarium’s wildlife rescue program. The aquarium staff taught him to eat fish, and they watched him grow into a fun and somewhat mischievous dolphin. Goose would sometimes steal tools when people worked on his pool, and he could make anything a toy. But ultimately, the National Marine Fisheries Service decided he was too young to be released back into the wild.
Goose, later renamed Ranger in homage to his Texas heritage, found his forever home at the Dolphin Research Center in the Florida Keys.
Made for manatees
The new Port of Corpus Christi Center for Wildlife Rescue, 26,000 square feet compared to the old metal building’s 5,000 square feet, will be able to accommodate significantly more animals. Gilbert said it can hold up to 4,000 sea turtles and a group of dolphins at the same time.
This is possible thanks to a new system that allows the aquarium to quickly build and break down pools measuring between 2 feet and 10 feet deep. The staff created the portable pool by repurposing a flood control system that goes around the aquarium during a storm to protect the building from flooding. If it could keep water out, could it also keep water in?
The answer was yes. An orange tube is filled with water to become the pool’s exterior. A pond liner is put inside of it, and then this is filled with sea water to create the temporary pool. The system was used for the first time this past summer and has been housing turtles ever since.
“It’s a pretty simple system that is working absolutely incredibly for us,” Gilbert said.
The new wildlife rescue building is also designed to accommodate manatees, particularly large mammals that are being spotted more frequently in the Gulf of Mexico. Gilbert said these animals are likely leaving Florida as that habitat becomes more challenging. They’ll fare alright around Texas in the summer, but the water could be too cold for them in the winter.
“As larger numbers move into the area and we experience a strong winter at some point, we’re going to have to be conscious of that,” Gilbert said. “So this program, and this new wildlife rescue center, was designed around manatees. That’s the biggest animal that we would receive.”
Aquarium visitors will now be able to watch rehabilitation work in real time. The building also has the state’s only CT scanner used specifically for wildlife, and the top floor is dedicated to wildlife resiliency research.