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Turtle triage

At the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, the overworked staff and volunteers labor to save loggerheads and other turtles sickened during Red Tide.

By SUSAN ASCHOFF
Published August 23, 2005

[Times photo: Ted McLaren]

Dr. Janine Cianciolo uses a plastic tube to feed a loggerhead sea turtle a solution of Gatorade and sodium chloride at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium this month. Staff members and volunteers had to hold the 100-pound-plus turtle at an angle so the fluid could flow into its stomach. Its eyes are swollen. Virtually all of the turtles rescued during the severe Red Tide bloom have eye lesions.

	Volunteer Michael Sosslau and vet tech Jessica Hall drain water from a plastic pool Aug. 12 so Sirata Sam’s nostrils will not be submerged. A healthy turtle lifts its own head above the water to breathe. Staff members and volunteers at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium have been working around the clock this month to care for turtles rescued along 26 miles of beaches.

CLEARWATER - The patient is critically ill. Glassy eyes. Unable to lift its head. A caregiver inches past his bed on the floor of a hallway, carefully placing each foot beside the motionless body covered in towels, stepping over a jutting flipper.

Above the prone turtle, a half-dozen volunteers and staff at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium share updates: A business has canvas and can make stretchers. A supply company in Tarpon Springs has eye drops if someone can fetch them. Phone calls have filled voice mail to the brink. The doctor has grabbed only three hours of sleep.

Since early August, the aquarium has triaged turtles. Ten loggerheads were found struggling in the Gulf of Mexico or washed onto the beach, creatures of the sea too sick to lift their heads above the water to breathe, too exhausted to dive for cover. Almost four dozen dead ones were also found by last weekend, loggerheads and greens and rare Kemp's Ridleys.

Tourists at Indian Rocks Beach spied a boulder bobbing in the surf and swam out to cradle a 190-pound loggerhead, holding its head above water until police and aquarium volunteers drove an SUV onto the sand and lifted the turtle into the makeshift ambulance.

South of Pinellas, at Sarasota's Mote Marine Laboratory, four turtles are being coaxed to live. Fifty-four dead ones have been brought in as well.

No one has seen anything like it.

In the waters of the Gulf of Mexico from Pasco to Sarasota counties, something is killing endangered sea turtles at five times the normal fatality rate. Experts blame Red Tide, a bloom of microscopic algae that appears as a sheen on the water and bleeds lethal toxins.

Disappointed tourists smell dead fish.

What they cannot see is Red Tide's wake of crabs, mollusks, starfish and coral littering the ocean floor, dead zones where decomposing animals suck oxygen from the water, killing still more.

The hallway smells of brine and sweat. Its air conditioning resuscitates volunteers in shorts and Tevas, fleeing a blinding sun and feels-like temperature of 110. On the mat, the loggerhead is too sick to snap at his would-be saviors.

***

Someone has brought a box lunch and two bottled waters to Dr. Janine Cianciolo. She does not eat. She plops down in a chair in an occupied office because there is an osprey in hers, its broken wing recently pinned, its predicament making it pushy.

Cianciolo says her turtle patients are in guarded condition.

Fluids, dextrose, vitamins and antibiotics are injected. Wet towels cover their shells. If their conditions improve, they will be fed fish shakes. Most have lesions on their eyes resembling cataracts.

"Looks like some of them will need eye surgery," Cianciolo says.

She fears there is organ damage.

"One of the biggest concerns now is getting the live turtles in for treatment," says the Clearwater Marine Aquarium's only veterinarian. "It's a very long rehabilitation process."

The goal is to return the turtles to the gulf. Florida's coastline is the largest loggerhead nesting site in the world, with 50,000 to 70,000 nests between May and September.

At the aquarium, the hospital wing is outside, under a shading tarp. In each of a cluster of kiddie pools, a loggerhead weighing from 150 to 250 pounds and stretching 3 to 6 feet in length rests on a gymnastics mat under a layer of towels.

The loggerhead rescued at Indian Rocks Beach - he is named Irb, for where he was found - has only his head exposed, like a swaddled baby.

Sirata Sam, found near Sirata Beach Resort in St. Pete Beach, came in five days earlier. For the first time, the 6-footer is lifting his head above 5 inches of water in his pool to breathe.

"It's an awesome milestone," Cianciolo says.

You can call her Dr. C. Everyone does. She is director of animal care and the aquarium's stranding coordinator, putting her on call around the clock.

Volunteer Mike Sosslau of Sand Key is attempting to keep Dr. C from doing everything. His instructions for the day are to be personal slave and gofer. Sosslau, 60, volunteers at the aquarium three days a week but has been here six straight.

He helped bring in Sirata Sam. Today he removed framed posters from the walls so they would not be knocked onto two turtles in the hallway awaiting transport to the kiddie pools. Outside he sprays towels and flippers with a garden hose every 20 minutes. He fetches the water bottles Dr. C forgets to drink. He mops the floor.

"I try to anticipate, to do things before being asked," he says.

He does the heavy lifting.

"One, two, three," Dr. C counts as five people grip the underside of a turtle's shell and lift, carrying it outside. "Watch the flippers!"

Nine-year-old Sam Zucker is dispatched for fresh towels. A string of drool dangles from the turtle's beak, which can crack shells. Or human bone. He does not fight. His eyes have the glazed look of a feverish child.

"When I saw it in the news, I thought, "I'll come in and do what I can,' " says Tricia McIntire, 35, who has been newly drafted to coordinate calls from volunteers. McIntire, a real estate agent in Clearwater, called her regular volunteer gig at Big Cat Rescue in Hillsborough County and asked if she could go help the turtles instead.

A former rodeo queen, she says, "I do it for the animals."

***

Some experts are calling 2005's Red Tide the worst environmental disaster in the gulf in 30 years. Others acknowledge how little we know about its causes and its long-term impact. Red Tides have occurred for a century. This year's bloom has lingered longer, arriving in January, and covered more geography, an estimated 2,100 square miles, than any since a massive bloom in 1971.

But is Red Tide killing the turtles?

"What we've got is a circumstantial case: Red Tide, lots of dead turtles. This is going to be the highest mortality that we know of," says wildlife biologist Allen Foley of the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in Jacksonville.

Scientists are uncertain why some species are affected more than others in any given Red Tide bloom. In 2002, Red Tide brought mass fatalities of manatees. In 2004, 107 bottlenose dolphins died in the Panhandle.

"The only thing we know for sure: If there's a Red Tide," Foley says, "animals will die."

Red Tide is microscopic algae that produces toxins. It poses a problem when its population explodes, poisoning animals' nervous systems, causing paralysis or weakness and inhibiting breathing. An affected sea turtle, for example, may not be able to control its neck to put its nostrils out of the water for air.

How those toxins poison sea animals is uncertain. One likely entree is the series of interconnected food chains. As reported in the journal Nature in June, toxins accumulate in sea grass, a prime source of food for manatees, and in fish, which are eaten by dolphins. A crab eats the toxic microalga, called Karenia brevis, and turtles eat the crabs.

There are no reports of human poisonings from fish consumption in Red Tide areas.

High concentrations of Red Tide are also found in the water and the air at the surface, where turtles, manatees and dolphins emerge to breathe. As dead animals decompose, they throw off more bacteria and suck up oxygen in the water, creating the dead zones observed in the gulf.

At Sarasota's Mote Marine Laboratory, which handles sea animal rescues south of the Sunshine Skyway bridge, they are nursing four turtles.

From 1993 to 2004, Mote averaged five to nine dead turtles a month. Thus far in August, they've recovered 54 dead, mostly loggerheads and Kemp's Ridleys, the rarest sea turtle in the world.

"That's huge," spokeswoman Nadine Slimak says.

Statistically, the count of dead turtles - those that reach shore - may be only 10 percent of the total fatalities, Slimak says.

Live patients are little help. Sea turtles are not lab rats. Even dead turtles may tell no tales. "We need fresh dead turtles so tissues can be examined microscopically," says Foley, the biologist. "And you need a lot of turtles, so you can look for a pattern. On these turtles, there will be all sorts of things (in their overall health) not related to Red Tide" which obscure the why of their deaths.

The increasing severity of Red Tide blooms points to pollutants and other man-made contributors to the problem, environmentalists say. Some studies link blooms to fertilizer runoff.

***

When Gerri Raymond arrived at work Aug. 12, the turtle crisis was a week old and her voice-mail recording said the basket was full. Since the first media reports about the turtles' plight, the phones have not stopped ringing.

Someone wants to bring in mats.

A man says he has a boat. "Should I be out there monitoring the waterways?"

"I was so touched by what is happening," says another.

Raymond, executive director of the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, is overwhelmed. She shows a check for $100 a woman moments ago pressed into her hand.

The aquarium will spend $5,000 to $6,000 over two months to nurse one sea turtle back to health, for everything from antibiotics to squid. The Belleview Biltmore adopted two turtles, covering expenses for Biltmore Bill (who is actually a Betty) and Cabana Connie. The Sirata hotel adopted its namesake.

With 22 employees and a monthly operating budget of about $100,000, the aquarium relies on labor from 10 times as many volunteers, and revenues from admissions and donations.

It does not, nor can it, budget for a turtle emergency like this one, Raymond says.

Two more live turtles will make it to the Clearwater Aquarium over the weekend, then two more the next week. As of Monday morning, the aquarium had nine turtle patients. And 45 found dead.

There is concern that now-emerging hatchlings will forge across the sand to the gulf only to die in the Red Tide. Aquarium spokeswoman Dana Zucker says that boat captains have seen dead hatchlings floating in the sea grass. Are they pulling sick adults from the water only to send healthy babies to their doom?

Foley, the biologist, asks where one would take turtle eggs, even if one could. The Panhandle waters are clear, he says, but Red Tide is dynamic. Transportation would stress the turtles, depleting the yolk food supply within their eggs.

"One of the good things is that turtles live in lots of places in Florida - the Panhandle, the Atlantic and the Keys," he says. "(Red Tide) has taken a toll but it's not getting them all."

Turtles live to be 80 to 100 years old. Females nest every two to three years, but then up to seven times. After the massive Red Tide bloom in 1971, environmentalists found life returning to dead zones within 18 months, and in five years populations reached previous levels.

Always, there is a balance to be struck between rescue and respect for nature's brutal code.

Perhaps Red Tide is a wildfire, once feared as ravager of forest and wildlife but now recognized as nature's way to rejuvenate the land. Red Tide deaths may limit spread of disease, some researchers suggest. Environmentalists worry it is yet another consequence of humans' abuse of the oceans.

Sirata Sam, who earlier brought joy by simply lifting his blockish head above 6 inches of water, later struggles to rest his chin on a tiny indentation in the pool wall, Sosslau notices.

Dr. C and volunteers drain water from the pool until he is beached on a puddle.

LEARN MORE

Go to www.floridamarine.org for information about Red Tide conditions. Visit www.cmaquarium.org and www.mote.org to learn more about turtle rescues. To help with rescue and rehabilitation efforts, call the Clearwater Marine Aquarium at 727 441-1790, ext. 222, or the Mote Marine Laboratory at (941) 388-4441, ext. 373.

-- Susan Aschoff can be reached at 727 892-2293 or aschoff@sptimes.com

[Last modified September 19, 2005, 18:03:14]