Hank Davis of Delray Beach rescued this green turtle while fishing along the beach in Briny Breezes. Photo provided
By Larry Keller
As if a green turtle dubbed Brontosaurus didn’t have enough obstacles to reaching old age — ingestion of and entanglement in plastic debris and fishing nets, boat strikes, discarded fish hooks, ocean pollution and climate change — it also had to fend off a shark attack.
In late December, Hank Davis was fly fishing in Briny Breezes when he noticed a group of children staring at a turtle struggling to swim no more than six feet from shore.
“I thought that’s strange, because turtles don’t usually come in that close, especially if there are a lot of people around,” said Davis, a retired psychology teacher in the international baccalaureate program at Atlantic High School and a Delray Beach resident.
“I got this guy to hold my fly rod … and I put one arm underneath her and tried to support her head. She didn’t try to get away. I’m pretty confident she was in shock. She was sort of flipping her fins and looking around. Her right flipper was just shredded … there was a lot of ragged tissue.”
Davis carried the turtle up to the beach. Then he called Joan Lorne of the conservation group Sea Turtle Adventures. She came immediately.
Davis placed the turtle on a wet towel on the floor of the passenger side of Lorne’s vehicle and she drove the critically wounded critter to Gumbo Limbo Nature Center in Boca Raton, which provides medical care and rehabilitation to injured and sick sea turtles.
The turtle was “quiet and docile” during the drive, Lorne said.
Emily Mirowski, Gumbo Limbo sea turtle rehabilitation assistant, displays the turtle, named Brontosaurus, which lost most of its right front flipper. Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star
“The front right flipper was for the most part bitten off,” said Emily Mirowski, Gumbo Limbo sea turtle rehabilitation assistant. “She still has her shoulder area.”
The turtle’s front left flipper was intact but had some teeth marks, and there also were shallow bite marks along the carapace, or shell.
Gumbo Limbo’s veterinarian and rehab specialists gave the turtle iron and vitamin supplements for blood loss, and sutured wounds to both front flippers. The injuries were cleaned with a solution, and raw honey — which has antibacterial and antifungal qualities — was applied to them. The turtle continues to receive antibiotics.
“She was a really healthy turtle before the shark injury.” Mirowski said. “She was robust. I don’t think she had any barnacles on her, or algae growth.”
She was named Brontosaurus because Gumbo Limbo is giving its patients dinosaur names until it reaches the end of the alphabet. And while Brontosaurus is called “she” by everybody, her gender won’t be evident until she’s at least a more mature 20 years old, said Gumbo Limbo’s manager, Leanne Welch.
The most common sea turtle malady the nature center treats is fibropapillomatosis, Welch said. That’s a disease that produces cauliflower-like tumors on a sea turtle’s body, even its eyes and mouth. Shark bite injuries to local sea turtles are neither common nor rare.
“We see maybe three or four a year,” Welch said. “There aren’t really a whole lot of sharks in our area that can take out a full-grown sea turtle. Our sharks here have a tendency to be a little smaller.
“With sea turtles, what we’ll see more often is evidence of an old injury that is healed.” But a turtle that is already sick and floating on the surface “is an easy mark.”
So is a youngster like Brontosaurus. She is estimated to be 5 to 7 years old and weighed a dainty 23 pounds when she arrived at Gumbo Limbo. Adults on average weigh about 350 pounds, but can reach 500 pounds.
Brontosaurus will be released back into the sea, likely in the spring, when it’s expected she will be fully healed and finished with her course of antibiotics, Mirowski said.
Until then, Gumbo Limbo visitors can view her swimming in one of the tanks she and other patients occupy.
“She is a popular turtle and we get a lot of questions about her,” Mirowski said.
“She’s already super strong and healthy. She’s swimming pretty well. She’s not struggling. That’s a good sign she’ll do really well in the wild.
“She still has the humerus bone near the shoulder region of the flipper. She’ll be able to use it, especially if she’s a female. She would still be able to come up on land and use it to nest.”
Unlike other species, green sea turtles eat a mostly vegetarian diet of sea grasses and algae. This gives their fat, not their shells, a greenish hue and accounts for their name. They are a protected, threatened species. Green sea turtles nest in more than 80 countries, and generally do so on south Palm Beach County beaches from May through September.
They can live to age 70 or older. Even with all the impediments Brontosaurus must overcome to survive that long, she has a chance. After all, sea turtles have endured for 100 million years — and perhaps were contemporaries of the actual brontosauruses.
Welch wouldn’t bet against her making it. “Sea turtles are remarkably resilient,” she said.
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