by Glen Chilton
Five young men shot to the front of the pack, and I knew that I would next see them at the finish line. After a couple of minutes, as the first spike of adrenalin disappeared, runners ahead of me started to slow down, and suddenly I wasn’t at the back of the pack. By the one-kilometre marker, I was trotting along at a comfortable pace, completely within myself and doing quite well, all things considered. At the two-kilometre marker, I passed an Arctic Tern colony, and a few of them decided to have a go at me. I was later told by a runner behind me that I was the only runner who got dive-bombed.
The great fiord to my left was decorated with whitecaps. The cliffs to my right were decorated with nesting kittiwakes. Not expecting pedestrian traffic, the highway had no shoulder, and we were running on the right with the traffic at our backs—not exactly what I had been taught about road safety by Elmer the Safety Elephant. I passed a cross and memorial plaque, probably for one of last year’s runners.
On I dashed, past hillsides covered with blooming lupines, feeling happy about life and hypothermia. Four kilometres, five, six. Less than four months from my fiftieth birthday, and I was doing quite well in a long footrace in Iceland. Seven kilometres, eight, nine. At the halfway point of the race, I was sitting in about tenth place.
On and on. And then I saw Ísafjöður looming ahead. That can’t be right. We still have six kilometres to go. Oh, now I remember. We have to run past the town, turn around at the end of the fiord, and then run back to Ísafjöður. This meant running the last couple of kilometres into an almighty headwind. I was forced to mix running with walking.
But none it of really mattered. Most of the people in the race were a lot younger than me. I was the only person in the race who hadn’t had a home-cooked meal in two months. The vomiting and diarrhea in Ethiopia had probably slimmed me down a bit, but I couldn’t claim to be at the peak of health. And who cared anyway? I was going to finish well, and felt pretty proud of it. Robin proved himself to be a star in the clutch. He had been standing at the finish line for twenty minutes and snapped my photograph as I crossed. He and I snacked on the banana, bagel, and chocolate bar in my finisher’s goodie bag, and I swung the finisher’s medal around my neck.
THE CLERK AT THE íSAFJÐR AIRPORT check-in counter took our luggage and issued us boarding passes. Then he turned to me and said, “There is a man looking for you.”
“Did he say anything about his wife?”
“What?”
“Nothing. Just a bad joke. Where is he?”
It was Lars from the tourism office. He had driven out to the airport because I had won a small trophy for placing well in the forty to forty-nine age class. I had also won two draw prizes—a training jersey and a cap.
Robin asked Lars why a truck with a flashing light was driving up and down the runway. Lars explained that the driver was trying to frighten Arctic Terns away from the runway so that they wouldn’t smash into the plane’s propellers. We watched the incoming plane swoop down into Ísafjöður and make a heroic turn the moment before touchdown. Robin and I both said “Shit!” when the left wing almost hit the tarmac.
But our plane got away safely, and fields of purple lupines fell behind. I drank a complimentary glass of water and sucked on an Air Iceland chocolate wafer. I have been told that the single worst cliché in the world of travel writing is “Iceland is a land of fire and ice.” While watching the back of Robin’s head, I struggled to come up with a replacement. I settled on “Iceland is a land of lava and lupines.” The royalty cheques should start arriving from the Iceland Tourism Board any day now.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A Leap of Faith
REASON NUMBER FOURTEEN FOR INTRODUCING A FOREIGN SPECIES: SOMEONE MUST HAVE GOOFED.
WHEN I FIRST SAW ROXY, she was swimming lazy laps of her indoor swimming pool. She wasn’t looking well, and the tumours all over her body didn’t add to her appeal. It was time to drag her out of the pool for a closer look.
Roxy is a green turtle, one of seven species of sea turtle recognized. All of them are doing very badly. The IUCN considers loggerheads and green turtles to be endangered, implying that both species are doomed unless the causes for their decline are reversed. Three other sea turtles, the leatherback, the hawksbill, and Kemp’s ridley, are critically endangered—doomed, only more so. The olive ridley turtle is doing slightly better, with the designation of vulnerable to extinction. This leaves the flatback turtle, about which we know so little that we can’t even assess how doomed it really is.
For a year, Roxy had been in the care of Dr. Ellen Ariel. Ellen is Senior Lecturer of Virology at the School of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia. She had long been interested in diseases of wildlife, and her recent efforts had been directed at viruses of turtles. Roxy had been brought to Ellen because her condition was so dire. If she had been left in the wild, she would have met her end rather quickly. Other facilities in the region were already full of turtles in need of aid. During her spell in captivity, Roxy’s condition had waxed and waned.
Most members of the scientific fraternity were working on the assumption that the tumours sometimes seen on sea turtles were the result of a virus known as fibropapilloma-associated turtle herpesvirus, mercifully abbreviated as FPTHV. The virus had been isolated from turtle tumours, but some researchers felt that the association between growths and the infectious agent was a just a coincidence and that some other causative agent was involved.
Some of Roxy’s tumours were as small as marbles, but others were the size of billiard balls. Growths that I took to be the youngest had small, pink, finger-like projections, hence the name “papilloma,” from the Latin word papilla for “nipple.” Others were smoother, in various shades of cream through grey. Some of the tumours toward Roxy’s backside looked as though they were necrotic, dying, and Ellen speculated that the tissue might have been attacked by a bacteria. Most of the tumours had a good grip, but others were attached by only a thin stalk, and I wondered if this separation might progress to the point where they might simply fall off. The tumours around her eyes were not the biggest, but they were among the most debilitating. Like blinkers on a racehorse, by creating a barrier they partially blinded her. After smelling food in the water and narrowing down the spot where she knew it must be, it took her several attempts to grab it.
Ellen said that she had named the turtle Roxy because she thought that it needed a strong name. She could only assume that Roxy was a female. Currently in middle age, with a carapace length of forty-eight centimetres, he/she/it will have to grow to eighty-six centimetres before it will be possible to determine its sex without an autopsy. At that point, Roxy will be nearly twice the size, so almost eight times the mass. If she lives long enough, she might grow to a length of 130 centimetres and could weigh between 140 and 160 kilograms. Green turtles have been known to grow to 230 kilograms.
Since she had been taken into captivity, Roxy had periodically been taken out of her tank so that blood samples could be drawn and photographs taken to chart the progress of her condition. On the day of my visit, Roxy was booked in with JCU’s Veterinary Emergency Centre and Hospital so that she could be X-rayed. As bad as Roxy looked on the outside, her future would be far bleaker if the tumours were also internal. I had volunteered to assist with some of the dirty work.
Ellen and I donned dark blue, heavy-cotton lab aprons and surgical gloves. Ellen was tiny enough that she could loop her apron strings twice and tie them in front; I had to knot mine in back. We laid a third apron on the floor. I got my instructions. The trick was to get the turtle safely out of her swimming pool and on to her back on the apron without breaking any bones—hers or mine. I stood quietly beside the waist-height pool and waited for Roxy to swim past me. I then reached in, took hold of her front flippers gently but firmly next to her armpits (flipperpits, I suppose), and scooped her up. In doing so, I had a good grip on a couple of tumours; there was no way to avoid them. I laid her down on the apron, a
nd we ever so slowly and gently reflected her front flippers to her sides. We then used the margins of the apron to secure her. We loaded Roxy onto a large top-loading scale, and Ellen was displeased to see that the turtle had lost mass since her last weighing. Well secured for the short walk to the veterinary clinic, Roxy lay in my arms completely docile. I took each step with no less caution than I would use for a small, sick child.
About halfway to the clinic, I came to an interesting realization. Sea turtles are heavy. Nowhere near full-grown, Roxy was still 12.5 kilograms, and she wasn’t equipped with a handle. I stopped beside a parked truck, put my foot on its bumper, and rested Roxy on my leg to give my arms a break.
In the clinic’s waiting room, I sat with the turtle on my lap while Ellen spoke with the receptionist. In a veterinary facility that is capable of treating both companion animals and large-bodied production animals, just about every sort of creature must come through the door sooner or later. Even so, the receptionist’s eyes got wide when she looked at Roxy and me.
“I think there’s something wrong with my rabbit,” I said, trying to break the ice. The receptionist smiled in a way that said she didn’t think I was funny.
We were met by Mike Jeffery, the clinic’s veterinary radiographer, and led into the X-ray facility. Like all people involved in the care of animals, part of Mike’s job was to deal with the anxiety of owners. Ellen looked comparatively calm, but she must have been worried about what news the examination might reveal. I certainly was. In just over an hour, I had become very attached to poor Roxy.
With the turtle on its back, securely wrapped and positioned carefully on the X-ray table, Mike, Ellen, and I retreated to the safety of the shielded portion of an adjoining room. When the first digital image came up, Mike let out an “Oh my!” I am not an expert in radiography, and all my previous experience involved examining X-rays of humans, but even I could see that the situation wasn’t great. The tumours stood out from the rest of the image as bright white spheres. They were large and numerous. If Roxy had been a pet dog or cat, she would have been euthanized immediately.
Mike repositioned Roxy a couple of times and snapped additional images. He said that we might get additional worthwhile information by capturing X-ray images horizontally through Roxy’s body. The difficulty was that the machine wasn’t designed to do that sort of work. The device that emitted the radiation could be swivelled, but the imaging plate couldn’t. “I need a volunteer,” said Mike. I immediately agreed to hold the plate in place and walked toward a rack of lead-lined aprons that would, presumably, protect me. I had a choice: there were bright pink aprons and others decorated in camouflage colours. I picked one of the latter and felt that I was being embraced by a heavy soldier. I wrapped a lead-filled collar around my neck to protect my thyroid gland and snugged up all of the necessary straps.
As the device shot X-rays at Roxy and me, two things came to mind. First, why was I protecting virtually all bits of me except my head? After all, my brain is one of my favourite organs. Then I wondered just how much radiation Mike was using. Surely it takes a lot of zapping to get through the massive shell of a sea turtle. After we were done, I asked. “About the same as a chest X-ray,” he replied. When I said that I was surprised that the shell wasn’t more opaque to X-rays, he explained that a turtle’s shell is more similar to cartilage than bone, and that this sort of radiation doesn’t have much trouble penetrating it.
Without further study of the images and a comparison to photographs taken earlier, we couldn’t be sure how many of the tumours on the X-ray images, if any, were internal. Before we left the clinic, Mike said in a low voice that Roxy’s prognosis for a long and happy life was not promising. I hoped that Ellen hadn’t heard him.
Ellen and I carried Roxy back to her enclosure, and after carefully unwrapping her, I lifted her back into her tank. She seemed to be floating a little higher than she had before, and Ellen explained that Roxy would have gulped a bit of air into her stomach and would float a bit strangely until she expelled it. I looked back at the laboratory apron that we had used to secure Roxy. It was littered with small chunks of tumour that had broken off in handling. Even though there is no way for the FPTHV to affect me, I was extra diligent in washing my hands.
MEMBERS OF SOME ABORIGINAL COMMUNITIES are entitled, by heritage, to capture and consume sea turtles. Some traditional custodians of the land have also become involved with the monitoring of sea turtle populations. Because of this constant involvement with the comings and goings of turtles, there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the sea turtle tumours we see today in Australia were not present much before 1990. Where had the virus come from and how had it arrived on Australia’s far-flung shores? I would be fibbing if I said that anyone knew with absolute certainty. We are not even certain yet how the virus is communicated from one turtle to another. Perhaps the virus has always been present, but it is only now expressing itself in tumours. Given the global pattern of distribution of FPTHV, it is possible that the disease was introduced to Australia by accident by humans. Maybe it arrived along with the dreaded cane toad.
Australia has a long history of plant and animal introductions, both intentional and accidental. Dingoes didn’t evolve in Australia, and they certainly didn’t swim there. Mediterranean rabbits and Central American cane toads didn’t come to Australia on their accumulated frequent-flier points. Early in the European history of Australia, naturalization societies were formed with the express goal of making Oz look more like home by introducing plants and animals. If the turtle virus was introduced by humans, it wouldn’t be the first. Both calicivirus and myxomatosis were brought to Australia in hopes of knocking back rabbits.
But now a hatred of alien invaders by Australians has become almost cliché. Dedication to preventing the introduction of any new creatures borders on mania. I can prove it. On January 29, 2011, my local newspaper ran a story about a former Qantas flight attendant who had avoided a prison term, despite being involved in the importation of 165 kilograms of cocaine, ecstasy, and ice, worth almost $100 million. The same issue of the newspaper reported on a woman who tried to illegally import to Australia live crystal red shrimps, worth about $1,000 each. She was sentenced to fifteen months in prison.
A FEW WEEKS HAD PASSED since Roxy had been X-rayed, and her condition hadn’t changed. Ellen was asked to make a presentation on sea turtles in the community of Bowen and offered to take me along. Two hours south of Townsville, Bowen is a regional centre for the fruit-growing industry and boasts magnificent beaches that are ideal for fun and sun. The Queens Beach Action Group, the organization with the third-worst acronym in Australia, was going to help with a large-scale capture of sea turtles a month later. A presentation on sea turtles was seen as a good way to help ensure local interest and support.
The group met at the Bowen Surf Life Saving Club headquarters, just off the beach. The small building was decorated with notices reminding people to swim where lifeguards could see them, and making suggestions about avoiding dangerous jellyfishes. While we waited for the appointed hour, one of QBAG’s organizers took us to proudly show off some newly installed plaques, close to the beach, describing the two species of sea turtles most likely to be seen in the area. The hope was that more people would become sensitive to the needs of turtles.
Ellen began her talk by explaining that FPTHV was first described from sea turtles in the Florida Keys in 1930. The first cases in Australia were noticed in Moreton Bay in 1990. Tumours on turtles on this part of the Queensland coast had first been found in 2004. Although the disease had been seen in all sea turtle species, it was mainly a condition of green turtles, most commonly those in their middle years.
As with herpes virus in humans, the appearance of the condition seems to be stress-related. Curiously, in this area, almost all of the sick turtles had been captured in a small region known as Brisk Bay. Ellen reviewed several possible explanations. Perhaps noxious chemicals from earlier mining or military operations we
re leaching into the bay, causing stress. Brisk Bay might be a focus for infection, or perhaps sick, weakened turtles got washed to the spot by some trick of tide and topography. Like so many aspects of the virus-induced illness, no one knew with certainty.
Ellen elaborated on the impacts of FPTHV. She explained that sea turtles are beautifully hydrodynamic, slipping through the oceans. Large growths on the body’s surface probably require more swimming effort. She showed pictures of large growths in the lungs of a turtle that had died near Townsville; it was hard for me to believe that it had been able to breathe at all. Ellen explained that individuals like Roxy had difficulty finding food when growths on eyelids hindered their vision.
Questions from the audience showed that they were paying close attention. “Do the growths have a blood supply?” Ellen was asked. “Do sick turtles ever get well again?” “Is it something that could make us sick?” The answers were “Yes,” “Sometimes,” and “Not as far as we know.”
ROXY’S X-RAYS HAD SHOWN HER LUNGS to be clear of tumours; if they had been infiltrated, her chances of long-term survival would have been virtually nil. But in the weeks following the imaging, her weight had continued to decline, now down to 12.1 kilograms. It had become increasingly apparent that the growths around her eyes were seriously impeding her vision, making it difficult for her to find food in her tank. She could smell food but had difficulty seeing it, although this likely wasn’t the only source of her weight loss. Surgery always involves risk, but in trying to balance Roxy’s quality of life against the potential hazards of treatment, the time had come to attempt to remove the ocular growths. Ellen called on Dr. Vaughan Seed, a specialist in veterinary comparative anatomy.
The Internet can be a wonderful source of information. It doesn’t take much searching to find instructions on How To Jump Out Of A Moving Car, How To Steal Someone’s Boyfriend, How To Hunt For Magic Mushrooms, or How To Land A Boeing 747-400. However, the Internet is strangely silent when it comes to How To Surgically Remove Conjunctival Tumours From A Green Sea Turtle. Vaughan was going to have to combine what he knew about general principles of analgesia and anaesthesia with his skill as a veterinary surgeon, mix in a bit of conjecture about marine reptile physiology, and then wing it.
