Wild Ride
I wanted to share this story since it's something I've been hearing about since I started doing sea turtle work in St. Lucie County. The St.Lucie nuclear power plant has a seawater intake pipe that draws in ocean water to cool the nuclear reactors. Inevitably, many turtles swimming in the nearshore waters are taken into the pipe and end up inside a large canal. Here they are surrounded by nets (so that they don't move any farther along the canal) and are eventually captured by a group of folks from Quantum Resources, whose job it is to capture, tag, document, and release all the turtles they catch.
I've been lucky enough to visit the canal on a few occasions and have seen loggerheads and green turtles captured and released...and I've seen the beautiful rays, sharks, and other fish that occasionally find themselves in the canal. I had only heard stories, however, of leatherbacks being drawn in and captured by the crew. Leatherbacks are not typically nearshore swimmers, and being so large, they tend not to accidentally take the wild ride down the intake pipe into the canal. But a few Fridays ago, as I was out doing the morning nesting beach survey, Brenda and I got a call that a leatherback had found her way into the canal. We rushed up there as fast as we could, hoping she was still swimming around (even though I've seen plenty of nesting leatherbacks with Chris, I've never seen a leatherback in the water).
When we arrived, everyone was stationed around the canal, nets in the water and plenty of hands on deck to help. Brenda and I stood on the dock, and after watching for what felt like hours, we finally saw the leatherback's black head and the anterior portion of her carapace rise above the surface as she took a breath. Despite her unfamiliar surroundings, the turtle was relatively calm (unlike other leatherbacks that have been captured, I was told). She managed to avoid the tangle nets quite well, but after a few laps around the canal, she suddenly appeared in the shallow water. Everyone scrambled to get more nets in the water, but she disappeared. At last, the turtle slowly swam up to the bank of the canal and stopped. It was almost as if she was asking to be taken out and returned to the ocean! Michael Bresette grabbed her flipper and yelled for help.
Several people grabbed a stretcher and pulled the massive turtle out of the water. She was scraped up quite a bit from her ride through the intake pipe, but seemed to be in good health. As everyone checked her over, we realized she had tags in her rear flippers! I was excited because I thought she may be one of Chris's turtles from Juno Beach, but the tags looked strange, so I knew she wasn't. She was quickly loaded up onto a trailer and driven out to the beach so that she could be released as soon as possible. Leatherbacks do not do well in captivity, and the stress of this event was probably quite exhausting for her.
Once on the beach, she slowly made it back into the surf. We all watched as she swam away. There were many people there who had never seen a leatherback before, so it was an exciting morning for everyone. I later learned that this turtle had been tagged in Honduras. Quite a swim from Hutchinson Island! It's clear that the work being done at the St. Lucie Nuclear Plant canal is important for documenting the turtles that are using Florida's waters. The benefit of tagging turtles is obvious too; we wouldn't have had any information about this leatherback if she hadn't been tagged. One mystery is left though, was she here to nest this season? Guess we won't know unless Chris sees her on the beach down in Juno!
posted by niki @ 4:05 PM
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