It’s me, Sam, and I’m at the Turtle Hospital in Marathon, Florida, whose motto is “rescue, rehab, and release.” So as a rescue diver, this is such an awesome opportunity. She’s so cute! Today, we’re going to learn about sea turtles, a reptile whose genetic history goes back over 200 million years, since the age of the dinosaur. Let’s go meet the turtles and the incredible people who work to save them. (upbeat music)
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I love the ocean. From the moment my feet touch the blue water, I’m instantly transported to my happy place. One of the most majestic and lovable creatures in the ocean is this little guy, and is also one of the most endangered.
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Today, I’m meeting Bette Zirkelbach, who is the operations manager at the Turtle Hospital in Marathon, Florida. She gets to work with sea turtles every day. How cool is that?
-Hi. Are you Bette? -Hi, yeah. Hi Sam.
-Nice to meet you. – Great to meet you.
Welcome to the Turtle Hospital. I can’t wait to see some turtles. Let’s go meet some turtles.(lock beeps, buzzes)
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- BETTE: And here are some juvenile green sea turtles.
- SAM: So their names are on their shell?
- BETTE: Yep. Similar if you go to the hospital, you have a wristband. You can’t really put wristbands on them, but that’s just to make sure they’re getting the right medications, although they’re very distinctive. If you look at the side of their heads, they have patterns that are unique to them, similar to our fingerprints. They’re getting ready to pull Poppy here. She’s had some challenges with one of her flippers, a bone infection called osteomyelitis. So we get updated radiographs regularly to see how that’s progressing. All right, we’re gonna head down here. We’ll let them go first. And you can see those plates on their back. -Yeah? -They’re called scutes. And they’re made of keratin, the same thing our fingernails are made out of.
- SAM: Scutes are the protective layer of a turtle’s shell and can also be found on the skin of a crocodile and the feet of birds. So how did she get this bone disease? She came in for a virus called fibropapilloma virus, and it is something that we see primarily in the juvenile greens.
- SAM: This virus infects the turtle’s skin outside the shell with warts. Over 50% of green juvenile sea turtles around developed islands like the Florida Keys have fibropapilloma. The spread of this virus puts the species at great risk. Poppy’s really lucky to be here. Let’s go see how her X-ray her looks.
- BETTE: Most of what we see come in the Turtle Hospital is human impact, whether it be a virus, you know, from environmental conditions, boat strikes, fishing gear entanglement, plastic or synthetic material ingestion. So we’re here to try to mitigate some of that.
- SAM: So next time you are at the beach and see some trash, pick it up! You could be saving a turtle’s life. -So here you can see her body her. -Yeah. We can see the flipper joints here. What we’re looking at today is this area here. You can see the bone is deteriorated away in this flipper joint.
Okay, yeah, I see that. So what– It kind of looks like a hand right there. It does, very similar to ours. Wow. So you guys will not release Poppy until that’s fully grown? Well, this won’t grow back, unfortunately. The bone has deteriorated due to infection. Once that stabilizes and she’s infection-free, we’ll release her, and she still has use of that flipper.
- SAM: Great news! After nearly two years of amazing care and treatment, Poppy’s almost ready to be released back into the wild. Time to meet the next patient, Briana, a loggerhead sea turtle
who is getting ready for a checkup.
- BETTE: There’s Briana.
- SAM: Wow, she’s huge.
- BETTE: Isn’t she fabulous? She’s got an attitude, this one, so they have to be very careful working with her.
- SAM: Wow. So how can you tell that she is a loggerhead?
- BETTE: Good question. They have a very wide head in reference to the size of their body, where a green turtle has a very narrow head. Okay. And why did Briana initially come here? She initially came in for a boat strike, and they– you look, as they get her cleaned up, it’s gonna be easier to see, but you see the back of her shell?
- SAM: Yep. BETTE: She Had a fracture. She was hit by a boat, and that prop cut through the shell and also cut through her spine, because the spine of a sea turtle is located right in the back of their shell her, and it did some nerve damage, so she doesn’t have use of her back flippers.
- SAM: Sea turtles are air-breathing reptiles, which means they can dive deep in the ocean to eat or even rest, but will need to surface to breathe. And she’s what we call the “bubble butt” syndrome, which is kind of silly to say, but it is a thing, the bubble butt syndrome, which means they float, and they’re not able to go underwater. So for a sea turtle, that means they would starve to death in the wild. We can’t release those animals, because their food source is at the bottom. We take weights, and we adhere them to the back of the shell
with some marine epoxy, and that just helps her to be more comfortable, act more like a turtle.
- SAM: Okay. BETTE: And go underwater. But we can’t release her with that, ’cause those scutes, those plates on their back her, they’ll continue to grow and shed for her whole life, so eventually those weights will shed off and have to be put back on .
- SAM: So she’ll stay here forever?
- BETTE: She’ll stay somewhere forever. SAM: Okay, right. So what we do when they’re otherwise healthy is, we adopt them out to aquariums all around the world.
- SAM: Okay. Even though Briana can’t go back to the wild, it’s great to know she’ll still be adopted and have a forever home. All cleaned up and ready to go. Bye, We had so much fun at the Sea Turtle Hospital with Bette and her team. Poppy, a green sea turtle, and Briana, a loggerhead, are getting excellent care here at the Turtle Hospital. You can tell the difference between loggerheads and green sea turtles just by looking at their heads. Loggerheads get their name because of their big heads. Sorry! No offense, Briana. While green sea turtles’ heads are more narrow. And sea turtles can live up to 100 years, but they are in danger. We can help protect and preserve these amazing species by just using less plastic and putting our garbage in the right place.
- So remember: recycle, recycle, recycle. See you next time on What Sam Sees.
Captioned by Captionmax
