How to (not) save a Turtle

Hello, Friend!

This is an amazing story of amazing people, and about a turtle rescue.

But first, let me tell you something about me. My name is Eike, I am a 39 year old marine scientist from Hamburg, Germany. I currently live in a quaint little fishing village, on a quaint little island, in a quaint little country called Thailand.

I studied marine biology at a renowned university, and already focused on marine tropical ecology during my bachelor, which was a great preparation for my job on this quaint little island.

My professors were great, and still are, but they forgot to teach me how to save turtles. Instead they taught me a lot about the light harvesting complex of photosynthesis. That might seem unimportant at first glance, but I have a feeling that it will play a vital role in my life, someday.

But enough of that, you came here to read about a turtle.

This turtle is called Claas Junior, shim* is the second turtle that we got acquainted with in the 3 years since CORE sea has opened its doors. The first one was called Yertle, who had lost her front flipper. I wasn’t on Koh Phangan when Yertle came to visit (I was on a conference on the light harvesting complex of photosynthesis), but everybody else (like Stef and Graham) was practically superheroes, and the turtle was transported to a rehabilitation facility. Today shim is teaching other underprivileged turtles to swim with 3 flippers.

After this adventure, it became evident to me that we only handled this situation so well because of the extraordinarily clever people we had at CORE (I was gone, remember?), and that we need a back-up plan, in case these people are not present when it happens again.

So I did what scientists do, I looked on Google, drank coffee, and then asked other scientists for help. The great Dr. Joao Neves and Dr. Elio Vincente, from the outstanding Ciencia y Educación del Zoomarine, supplied me with books on marine reptile husbandry and turtle rescue procedures (and necropsy, because…). Just a few thousand pages, which I leisurely read, while taking breaks from pondering about the light harvesting complex of photosynthesis.

I was well prepared when the call for Claas Junior came.

Claas is a sub-adult Green Turtle (Chelonia mydas), who got swept into a fishing net by the big waves of the monsoon, pretty close to our center. A group of divers found shim and took shim to shore. Thank you Aksel, Alex and your customers.

What the books did not explain, was how to handle the local population, who was preparing to eat Claas Junior. You might think that this is outrageous, but that’s actually pretty Eurocentric and condescending of you, if you think about it, and you should feel bad.

So I improvised: in my best worst Thai, I mumbled something about the Ministry of Conservation, hoping they would misunderstand, and think that we’re actually working for them (which we don’t we’re working “with” them). It worked, and I was able to do an initial inspection, to ascertain Claas Juniors’s health.

In my professional opinion, Claas Jr. is a miserable old git. Because he* bit me and slapped me, which actually hurts a lot. There was nothing about this in the books. It also implied that he was not really injured, but just being a big baby about it. So we wrapped him in a wet towel and took him to the center to calm down and chill out. In a tub. Naturally, to calm down a turtle, you’d ideally want people playing football around him, and bring a few kids in to try and pet him. I also couldn’t remember this from the books, so I went to my desk to check. It wasn’t in there, instead it said “if the turtle is acting like a miserable old git, there is no reason to keep him in your lab kitchen. Stop reading this and take him back to the sea.” I’m paraphrasing here.

So I went over to the kitchen to give him the good news, but Claas jr, was not happy. He was playing dead. After rubbing a bit of life back into him, I decided it’s time to get him back home, so we put him on the back of the truck and drove him to the next bay, which I’m sure he enjoyed a lot, the students love being on the back of the truck, too.

We carried him down to the water, scrutinized by the entire beach population of a quaint little island, and finally released him back into the wild.

It was a mind-melting experience of serendipity or serenity (I should probably look this up). Seeing this beautiful animal swimming away into the sunset on this gorgeous beach.

Only he didn’t. He turned around and tried to bite me. And then again. And then Roy. And then Youp. And then he kept swimming in circles. He clearly forgot how to turtle.

We watched him until the sun set.

This is what it looks like on video. I left out the biting bits, because I don’t want you to see me crying. Also, we didn’t film it.

Naturally, this is just my personal, biased, reiteration of the events. The other great people that were there, like Stefan and Shim Follows, Roy Besselink, Youp Schaake, Janina Schoenig and other people I regretfully forgot, will have a different version to tell.

A very wise man (it was Elio) once told me that turtles are very resilient, and no matter how bad of a job you do, you probably still saved an endangered species. I liked that very much.

This turtle is called Claas Junior, after one of our most resilient benefactors, Claas Steigueber, who deserves a medal. He also send us this picture, therefore he technically won the internet.

Thank you for reading

Eike

*why “shim”? We don’t know the gender so she+he=shim. I never really understood this

*why “he”, now? He is a miserable old git.