South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
South Florida sea turtles are stars of a WLRN documentary
Some tiny South Florida sea creatures are getting a big focus in a new WLRN documentary.
The public broadcaster’s onehour film on sea turtles, “Troubled Waters: A Turtle’s Tale” debuted Thursday, with encore broadcasts throughout the month including 9 p.m. today, 11 p.m. Oct. 20 and 2 p.m. Oct. 27 on Channel 17.
Narrated by actor Peter Coyote and featuring Ted Danson, the project looks at how human behaviors from commercial fishing to trash and climate change are impacting sea turtles from the Florida Keys to Palm Beach county.
“Sea turtles are the perfect creature to take the viewer through this much bigger tour de force of the environmental threats man has created that we must now face up to,’’ said Cortney Fielding, the documentary’s field producer and writer.
The film opens at the Gumbo Limbo Nature Center in Boca Raton where conservationists rescue and rehabilitate injured sea turtles that are struck by boats, found tangled in trash and poisoned by toxic waters.
Viewers will also meet Jeanette Wyneken, a biological sciences professor at Florida Atlantic University. She’ll talk about her research on how dwindling male sea turtle populations and the increase in females are related to rising temperatures in the sand where the nests are laid.
Adrienne Kennedy, an executive producer at WLRN, said that it was a Sun Sentinel article from January 2018 about Wyneken’s work that sparked the idea for the documentary.
“Troubled Waters was initially conceived when it came to our attention that not a single male sea turtle hatchling had been spotted in three years on Boca Raton’s beaches,” said Kennedy. “Our hope is to build more awareness and a better understanding about how we are all impacting not just Florida’s, but the world’s fragile ecosystems.”
Producers traveled to The Turtle Hospital, the nonprofit facility in Marathon where manager Bette Zirkelbach and her veterinarians nurture turtles back to health and help them recover from Fibropapilloma, a disease that causes cauliflower-like tumors.
Kennedy said she wants the film to reach a national audience sometime in 2020.
“We all feel there is a need to get this story out there in front of as many people as possible,’’ she said.
The documentary arrives just as sea turtle nesting season is coming to a close Oct. 31. Three species of sea turtles regularly nest on South Florida beaches. They are green turtles, leatherbacks and loggerheads, with the latter being the most common in the area according to Broward.org.