NY Marine Rescue Center public turtle release season closes

As the summer comes to a close, so does New York Marine Rescue Center’s public release season for rehabilitated animals.

On Thursday night, the organization held their final public release of the season, where six critically endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtles swam away off Hampton Bays’ Tiana Beach as hundreds of spectators cheered them on.(Credit: Melissa Azofeifa footage)

The Riverhead-based non-profit organization responds to stranded or injured “sea turtles, seals, small cetaceans [dolphins and porpoises] in New York State,” according to its website. This summer, they released an estimated 60 animals back into the wild — including  sea turtles and seals — according to Maxine Montello, the nonprofit’s rescue program director.

The six turtles all stranded during cold-stun season, which begins late fall when water temperatures sink to below 50 degrees, according to the National Aquarium. Ms. Montello described the malaise as “ a phenomenon similar to hypothermia.”

“Because [the turtles] are cold blooded, they can’t regulate their own internal temperature,” she said. “They’re here all summer, and then it turns to fall and winter pretty quickly and so they don’t get the environmental cue to move on, and because of that they stay here and they get continuously exposed to this quick drop in temp and they become debilitated, and they float at the surface.”

Starting in November through early January, the organization goes to the beaches in the region finding cold-stunned sea turtles, Ms. Montello said.

“Many of them have heartbeats of less than one beat per minute, where normally it’s about 32 beats per minute,” Ms. Montello said. “They also are not breathing on their own so they need to be intubated. They’re super dehydrated because they haven’t been eating anything or drinking anything and so it takes us about eight to nine months to rehab them, have them gain weight, be able to get their shells under control — some of them come in with shell damage — and get them to be able to go back in the wild.”

All six turtles were between 3 and 5 years old. As each one arrived at the rehabilitation facility, according to Ms. Montello, it was named after other animals.

“That’s probably the best part of the job for the team, is the naming,” Ms. Montello said. “We always do a new naming theme, so this year doing animals named after animals has been fun.”

The turtle’s names are Axolotl, Echidna, Manta Ray, Sunfish, Piping Plover and Cuttlefish. Volunteers in three groups of two released the six turtles.

Some released sea turtles have satellite tags affixed to their shells so their locations can be tracked on a on a map available on the NYMRC website. But Kemp’s ridley turtles have spiky shells, making it challenging to attach the tag. Instead, Ms. Montello explained, they receive flipper tags and have microchips placed under their skin. 

“These are all great tracking for if the animal was found again, say it stranded or somebody saw it on the beach nesting , they could look at those numbers and report them, they could call any rehab with those numbers or any sea turtle network.

Once released the hope is that these turtles will head south and move towards warmer waters, Ms. Montello said.

“We’re a small not-for-profit, and so all our donations are coming from the general public and so we’re happy to have the support here and be able to have everybody come here and see these animals go back to the wild and any donations, big or small, really helps the organization,” she said.