HOW TO SAVE A LOGGERHEAD
THEY ALL HAD SCARS.
They had flippers with chunks missing in the shape of shark bites. They had leeches marauding the wounds in their scales. Their shells had been hit by boat propellers, carving howling red divots into the tops of their backs. They had yellow-gray eyelids that opened slowly, and black eyes in the folds underneath, eyes that had always known the ocean—the depths of it, the miles of it—and reflected under hospital lighting the kind of ancient wisdom of whatever it was they had seen. They sighed, turtle sighs, as if their patience in humans had worn thin. They had intestines full of plastic. They had been sucked up into dredges. They had fishing hooks lodged in their mouths, their long reptilian tongues occasionally rising out of their jaws as though they were trying to speak. Two hundred and seventy-five sea turtles over the course of nineteen years, rehabilitated at the South Carolina Aquarium in Charleston and released back into the ocean: Kemp’s ridleys, leatherbacks, loggerheads, and greens, all listed as either endangered or threatened.
Stinky was the first sea turtle brought to the aquarium, bloated from an internal infection and rehabbed in a plastic kiddie pool because there wasn’t a turtle tank when the building opened, in 2000. Channel had a crack near the bottom of her shell. Pirate was ninety-eight pounds of pale green skin, with lockjaw and parasites in her intestines. Ripley was the turtle with the gnarly spinal injury; Little Pritchard had a stingray barb in his elbow joint; Barrington, struck in the head by a boat, required surgery on his brain.
One of the biggest turtles the aquarium has ever received was a loggerhead with glistening eyes, a rime of algae and barnacles (epibiota) growing on his face and shell, and an unforgettable scar. He was found near McClellanville, South Carolina, off the coast of the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge, a
