Turtle Care

Friday, August 3^rd

Today, we spent a long time taking care of the stranded Hawksbill. First, we cleaned all of the algae off its carapace and plastron. Hawksbill shells are beautiful, so we wanted to make it shine. We tried using a sponge, but it didn’t work well so we ended up using our nails. Afterwards, we pried the barnacles off the turtle's shell. There was one big one on the carapace and a ton on the plastron. It’s natural for turtles to have barnacles, but it had a lot for its age. Barnacles bury into the shell and can damage it, so taking off as many as possible is always good. After about a day in freshwater they come off much easier because they start to die. BTW, I’m calling this turtle an “it” because the turtle is too young to determine the sex without blood work. We guesstimate that her age is between 4-5 years. After cleaning its shell, we put antibiotic anointment on its wounds. They were very small, but we wanted to take every precaution possible. Next, we weighed the turtle and put an IV in it. The IV had a Suero-like mixture for vitamins and re-hydration. During all of these activities, Alice taught us different ways to handle turtles and how to make them comfortable. When everything was done, we put some fish in the water to see if the turtle would eat anything. It was really cool to do some rehab-like work. 

Pre-Cleaning: you can see all of the algae that has built up on the shell 

 

TJ scrubs the turtle's carapace while I hold her in place

 

 

The next step was removing all the barnacles from its plastron 

 

 

We removed over 40 barnacles!

 Post-cleaning: injecting the turtle with Suero for re-hydration purposes

For patrols, Andrea and I had a bad night. We came upon a parlamero who refused to give us a donation. We spent 20 minutes arguing with him. He was extremely rude and unpleasant to deal with. To make things worse, while we were arguing it started to pour. By the end of it, we were upset and soaked. We started walking back to the parque and found another track, but the eggs had already been taken. About 10 minutes away from the parque, we came upon a dead turtle…just to top off the night. I heard later that a dead turtle washed up in the other direction as well. Not a good night for turtles.