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From the outset, it was clear that FeeBee possessed star quality, a certain je ne sais quoi that set her apart from all the rest. She had vitality, drive, oodles of personality. And not even Dakota Fanning debuted at so tender an age.

Truth be told, though, you’d have to classify her as a prima donna. And a Caretta caretta, world’s largest hard-shell turtle: a loggerhead.

Hers is the beaky face that graces the poster for Turtle: The Incredible Journey, the 81-minute documentary scheduled for a screening and cocktail reception on Tuesday, Nov. 9, at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach. Proceeds from the event will help the FAU Sea Turtle Research Program buy environmental monitoring devices and an aquatic filtering system and benefit turtles everywhere.

The film follows the life of a loggerhead from hatchling to maturity. It’s a perilous, quarter-century, cross-the-Atlantic slog packed with more thrill-’em, kill-’em adventure than any 10 episodes of Sea Hunt.

Honesty prompts the movie’s scientific adviser, Dr. Jeannette Wyneken, to offer up a little behind-the-scenes secret: during the 2007 filming, FeeBee had more than a few stand-ins. “It was multiple turtles,” says Wyneken, an associate professor of biological sciences at FAU and one of the world’s leading turtle biologists. “Like Lassie; there were multiple Lassies.”

Much of the film, in fact, was shot in glass tanks, right here, at FAU’s turtle lab, tucked amid the flora and fauna and nature trails and educational buildings of Boca Raton’s Gumbo Limbo Nature Center.

When it isn’t playing film set, and even when it is, the lab is the site for multiple projects. Inside, rows of chest-high blue tubs act as a mini-ocean for the turtles, each afloat in its own pastel container. They are, Wyneken says, former Easter baskets — non-toxic plastic, of course — from which her students laboriously yanked off the handles.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, Wyneken’s associate, Dr. Kate Mansfield, is sitting out back on a concrete walk, hunched over a palm-sized turtle, a tube of silicone adhesive and a solar-powered satellite tag, about the size of pencil-box pencil sharpener, which she is affixing to the top of the turtle’s carapace.

This turtle is one of a group awaiting release, the next day, into the Atlantic. Each time the tag is above the water line, its antenna will send VHF signals to a NOAA satellite. Collected data gets sent back to the lab. “We pitch ’em in the ocean and wait for them to call home,” Wyneken deadpans.

A second lab project hopes to gauge turtles’ color sensitivity. It matters. What if, say, a fishing line dangles colorful enticements, intended for fish, but lures an intrigued turtle instead?

Both movie and lab projects are, ultimately, about understanding conservation: “We can’t protect [turtles] if we don’t know where they are or what they’re doing,” says Wyneken.

Even as a kid, Jeannette Wyneken hung out with turtles. The dime store variety, the sort that usually expired of dehydration under the sofa. But not hers. She had one that lived to be 29.

FeeBee was about 4 months old when Wyneken turned her over to marine conservationist Dr. Kirt Rusenko, a man who can easily rattle off this year’s nesting numbers: 577 loggerheads (the best in the last 10 years), 131 greens, and 15 leatherbacks.

It was Rusenko who elevated FeeBee from educational display turtle to film star. “Probably because she was the most aggressive, so she had the most personality,” he says. “She wasn’t easy to handle. She was slapping you with her flippers, peeing on you, trying to bite you.”

Rusenko’s grad student and employee Cody Mott learned that, up close and painfully. When Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Nick Stringer and his crew shot an in-the-lab
“night” scene, using a black cloth festooned with bio-optic “stars,” it was Cody who entered the tank, held onto FeeBee’s butt and shoved her toward the underwater camera. She turned around, swam the other way and bit Cody on her way back.

There are easier things than explaining Take Two to a turtle.

Alas, as many a leading lady has learned, the spotlight shines but briefly. FeeBee was 6 years and 4 months old when released, in 2008, into Indian River Lagoon, near Sebastian Inlet. Her battery-powered satellite tag quit a year later, when she was off the coast of Boston, en route most probably toward the Azores and the Canary Islands and West Africa. With luck she’s expected home, to the beach where she was born, in two decades or so, to lay her own clutches of eggs, whereupon the cycle will begin anew.

For now, FeeBee has far less to worry about from film critics than from other potential predators — sharks or killer whales or, most especially, fishermen. Not from audiences.

“The turtle story is pretty compelling’ Wyneken says. “They are ancient animals who have been around longer than we have. You’re looking not only at where the turtle goes, but how things have changed over time.”

* * * *

Turtle: The Incredible Journey

Written and directed by Emmy Award-winning director Nick Stringer

Tuesday, Nov. 9

Cocktail reception: 6:30 p.m.

Screening: 8 p.m.

Crest Theatre, Old School Square, Delray Beach

Ticket prices start at $100.

For information, call Avy Weberman 561-297-0007 or email aweberman@fau.edu