Sick Turtle

Wednesday, August 22th

I woke up to a text at 6:00am from one of the volunteers stating that she had found a sick stranded turtle while on crawl counts. I immediately got up and started filling the holding tank with water. The turtle was extremely skinny and very weak. It barely struggled when you lifted it up. Mariachi and Willi insisted on administering Suero right away even though it is better to wait. You want to let the turtle get settled and see what is really wrong. After looking over it some, we could see that it was coughing up blood, which is never good. 

Later, Alice came over to the parque and we measured and weighed the turtle. Afterwards, we went back to her house to for a Spanish lesson. On the way there I got a call from a volunteer saying that the turtle had stopped breathing. We headed back to the parque and saw that the turtle was dead. We conducted a necropsy to find out what was wrong. Upon opening the turtle up, we were able to conclude that it was an immature male, one of its lungs was full of blood, and its intestines were filled with green diarrhea. Alice had seen the green diarrhea before and it is basically a death sentence for the turtle. The lung filled with blood wasn’t good either. Alice contacted the turtle vets in the City to see what could have caused that. It's sad because when we got this turtle, it was basically on its death bed. There was nothing we could have really done to save it unfortunately. 

 

 The poor turtle

 

 An abnormal turtle lung

In the evening, we got another nest and two more hatchlings from a different nest. These tortuguitas are hatching like crazy!!