In Oct. 2019, a depressing photo of a dead baby loggerhead turtle was posted online by Gumbo Limbo Nature Center, based in Boca Raton, Florida. In the picture, the turtle had 104 pieces of plastic neatly organized in rows displayed next to its dead body. All the pieces of plastic were previously inside the animals’ digestive tract.
The photo went viral and people were outraged! However, while the public was shocked, dead baby turtles with plastic in their intestinal tracts are something Gumbo Limbo staff find every day.
“Unfortunately, it’s not unique. I was just down there, and they’re necropsying another washback with plastic in it. It’s something we see every day,” said Leanne Welch, manager of the Gumbo Limbo Nature Center. Welch has rescued and rehabilitated sea turtles for the past 30 years.
Hungry Turtle
The little dead turtle was a “washback” turtle. Washback turtles are baby turtles that swim into the ocean a few miles out until they hit seaweed patches, but after a few weeks, the creatures wash back to shore.
This particular turtle they found, had a wide variety of plastic in its belly. It was a hungry turtle! “We found a piece of a balloon. There was a wrapper that goes on the outside of bottles,” said Whitney Crowder, 39, the sea turtle rehabilitation supervisor at the Gumbo Limbo Nature Center.
Gumbo Clinic
The washback season is a hectic time of the year, with thousands of turtles just trying to survive.
Gumbo Limbo Nature Center staff wrote in a Facebook post:
It’s washback season at Gumbo Limbo and weak, tiny turtles are washing up along the coastline needing our help. Unfortunately, not every washback survives. 100% of our washbacks that didn’t make it had plastic in their intestinal tracts.
The problem is so prevalent in Boca Raton, where the clinic is based, that the Gumbo clinic even has a drop-off point for locals to leave sick turtles. Thousands of washback are handed in during some seasons, therefore, the clinic has a 24-hour-emergency line.
Most of the time, the turtles’ systems get blocked up from plastics, with some who get their stomachs punctured by it. The staff at the Gumbo clinic try their best to bring them back to full health. They flush the plastic out of the turtles’ system by feeding the creature a diuretic. Then the turtles are put into a water-tank and left to rest on tiny hammocks. The hammocks help prevent them from drowning if they are too weak to swim. After some time, those who survived are driven out to the Gulf Stream and set free, back into the ocean. “It makes me feel sad having to put them back where we found them, but that’s nature,” Crowder said.
As for those who didn’t survive, the clinic performs a necropsy. Necropsy is incredibly time-consuming when it involves going through each of a baby turtle’s tiny body parts and carefully picking out plastics. Especially if it’s 104 individual plastics – per turtle!
Nesting Grounds
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission affirm that there are five species of turtles that call Florida beaches their home. These include the loggerhead, green, leatherback, kemp’s ridley, and hawksbill. Under the Endangered Species Act, all of these species are endangered or threatened. However, the loggerhead turtle is the most common species found nesting in the Boca Raton area.
When a female loggerhead lays her nest in the sand, the eggs incubate for around 60 days until babies emerge. Immediately, the babies sprint across the beach as fast as they can towards their new ocean home. They reach the water, jump in, and swim as fast as they can, for several miles offshore until they hit floating mats of seaweed called sargassum. While most hatchlings are perfectly healthy, a tiny fraction are born with a rare condition called polycephaly — having two heads on a single body — which makes their already slim chances of survival even more precarious.
Life On Seaweed
The baby turtles settle into their new floating seaweed home, they find food and shelter there for the first years of their lives. Unfortunately, among the small shrimps that they find to eat in the sargassum, they also find a feast of plastics to eat too.
Gumbo staff wrote:
Many of these young turtles are dying from plastic impaction. The plastic plugs them up and causes them to go into septic shock. Plastic pollution is the sad world we live in now. We need to do better.
As individuals, we can eliminate single-use plastics from our lifestyles and prevent the death of thousands of baby turtles around the world.
