Back in 2000, when the South Carolina Aquarium opened in Charleston, S.C., rescuing sea turtles wasn’t part of its remit. But the Aquarium was quickly pressed into service when a loggerhead sea turtle washed ashore.

“We got a kiddie pool from K-Mart and filled it with water,” said Kevin Mills, the Aquarium’s president and chief executive officer. “And once that happened with the first patient, we were called on with increasing rapidity to take on additional patients that had washed ashore or were struggling in the water.”

Aquariums have saved tens of thousands of sea turtles over the years and such strandings are worsening with the impact of climate change, plastic pollution, habitat loss, and injuries from fishing equipment and vessels. All sea turtle species in the U.S. are now listed as threatened or endangered.

Until recently, however, there was no direct federal money available to aid the approximately 50 permitted organizations nationwide and in Puerto Rico that, for years, have used their own resources to save sea turtles. 

Then came the pandemic, “which forced everyone to look at their financial situations and where they were investing their resources,” said Mark Swingle, who last year retired as the Virginia Aquarium’s chief of research and conservation and is now a consultant for the Aquarium.

In 2020, the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Md.; the New England Aquarium in Boston, Mass.; and the South Carolina Aquarium, began a lobbying effort to convince Congress to allocate money in its fiscal year 2023 budget for sea turtle rescue and rehabilitation. 

The aquariums also separately pushed for the Sea Turtle Rescue Assistance Act, which, like the John H. Prescott Marine Mammal Rescue Assistance Grant Program does for marine mammals, would provide permanent funding for sea turtles. 

Like many, Maggie Ostdahl, conservation policy manager for the National Aquarium, assumed there was legislation for sea turtles similar to the one for marine mammals.  When told that wasn’t the case, she said, “that started us down the rabbit hole of ‘well, why isn’t there?’”

So, she, her colleague Ryan Fredriksson, vice-president of government affairs for the National Aquarium, along with the two other aquariums and a lobbying firm, spearheaded a major push for funding in the 2023 budget and more permanent financial help through the proposed Sea Turtle Rescue Assistance Act. 

In 2020, “we basically started a listening tour,” on Zoom, Fredriksson said, talking to government and elected officials about the resources needed. In order to have some hard numbers to show the cost of sea turtle rescue and rehabilitation, they reached out to eight permitted organizations, including their own, and asked how much they spend on taking care of sea turtles.

The answer was cumulatively about $5 million per year to care for about two thousand turtles over a two-year period, Fredriksson said.

“There’s a gap in government funding, so let’s fill that gap,” he said. “Sea turtles are stranded in red states, sea turtles are stranded in blue states. It’s not partisan.” 

Congress’s allocation of $500,000—far less than the $5 million requested—won’t fill the gap, but it’s a start.

“It’s the first time we’ve seen sea turtle rescue make it into the federal budget,” said Alissa Weinman, government relations manager for the New England Aquarium. “It’s a growing issue and members of Congress are really paying attention and understand.” 

The money will be distributed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), but the details have not been confirmed yet.

The second part of the effort, The Sea Turtle Rescue Assistance Act, had bipartisan sponsorship, a rarity these days. It unanimously passed out of the House Natural Resources Committee last session but didn’t move further, so, like all stalled bills, will have to be reintroduced in the current session.

“We’ve already heard from many offices in Congress this year that they’re excited to work on the bill, again,” said Fredriksson.

One of the many aquariums that will be delighted to see any additional resources will be the New England Aquarium. The Gulf of Maine is one of the most rapidly warming areas in the world, Weinman said, and the Aquarium’s Sea Turtle Hospital in Quincy, Mass., has seen a rapid increase over the past decade in the number of stranded turtles. 

The numbers have grown from under 100 ten years ago to 897 turtles found on Cape Cod beaches in 2022-23 season—659 of those were alive, and 528 were treated at New England Aquarium’s Sea Turtle Hospital, she added.

A majority of sea turtles that need help are cold-stunned; research shows much of this is due to climate change; as waters increasingly warm, turtles stay longer in the north, delaying their migration south. Then they get caught in the cold water—often trapped in the “hook” of Cape Cod Bay. If they are stuck too long in cold water, they become cold-stunned, struggling to swim.

In Texas, changing weather patterns also plays havoc as does entanglement in fishing equipment. The coastal wildlife rescue program at Texas State Aquarium in Corpus Christi, Texas, is one of the largest in the country, said Jesse Gilbert, the Aquarium’s president and chief executive officer. “And the vast majority of our rescue portfolio over the last five years has been dominated by sea turtle rescue—mostly green turtles—and recovery. We have had multiple events in the last five years where we’ve had over 1,000 sea turtles show up at one time.”

Winter Storm Uri, in February, 2021, was the pinnacle, so far, of sea turtle strandings in Texas, with about 13,000 turtles washed ashore; the Texas State Aquarium managed to rehabilitate 1,600 in water.

“We learned a lot with Uri,” said Gilbert.  “One was that the sea turtle population is robust and a lot more fertile than we initially thought—and the next disaster, hurricane or freeze, could be really big numbers. And the other thing was that if we were able to put the sea turtles in water during the rehabilitation process, we had a 95 percent success rate of getting them back into the Gulf of Mexico.”

The Texas State Aquarium spends about $250,000 annually on sea turtle rescue and rehabilitation, Gilbert said, and in March, it opened its new Port of Corpus Christi Center for Wildlife Rescue, one of the largest in the U.S. 

Green sea turtles are vital to recreational fishing in the state, he said, because they eat sea grass in the estuaries where most of fishing occurs. “Recreational fishing is an important part of being a Texan. And if you take that keystone species out, that structure collapses.”  

Although the Texas Aquarium wasn’t as involved as some others in pushing the federal funding and legislation, Gilbert said Republican Sen. John Cornyn reached out to get their opinion on the Sea Turtle Rescue Assistance Act.

“We told him we were totally on board,” Gilbert said. “The sea turtle efforts in Texas really spoke to the Senator and he championed it.” 

The hope always is that stranded turtles can be saved, but “the examinations of those turtles that are not alive are critical to understanding the threats that exist,” said Swingle. “I tell people, the stranding response networks are the first line of defense and the first line of investigation into how these animal populations are doing in the wild.”

While research is important, watching how the turtles are rehabilitated is a big part of educating people and increasingly aquariums are making these facilities public-facing.  The Texas State Aquarium’s Port of Corpus Christi Center for Wildlife Rescue is free to the public and guests can follow a turtle through its recovery and even be present when it’s released.

At the South Carolina Aquarium, which has budgeted $650,000 for sea turtle rehabilitation this year, guests can also see the turtles being treated, interact with the caregivers, and even figure out a diagnosis, said Mills. “We talk about how everyone can minimize the risk from plastic pollution to cleaning up sandcastles so turtles don’t get stranded in the crevices. It’s become a powerful education tool.”

In fact, once the Aquarium started announcing sea turtle releases on social media, thousands flocked to the shore to watch, he said. “Kids were carrying signs with the names of the turtles.”

The public enthusiasm Mills said, “speaks to the power of this iconic species to move people.”

Hero Photo Credit: © National Aquarium

---

Back to All Stories