by Carl Safina
The sudden crackle of Julie’s voice over the walkie-talkie startles us. She’s found a turtle with tumors, on the south beach. Vanessa, Aaron, Nick, and I strike out. The beach looks like a thin light ribbon separating the black sea from the black land, under a cloud-blackened sky. My eyes begin adjusting to the dark as we walk the narrow wedge of beach at the water’s edge. We walk past driftwood branches draped with roosting frigatebirds and boobies. And it’s not always easy in the dark to tell the seals from drift logs. We give each the benefit of the doubt and a wide berth. An occasional phosphorescent jellyfish lights up in our footsteps in the wave-washed sand.
The tiny silent runners directly in our path on the beach are crabs abroad from daytime burrows. Vanessa says. “When the nests hatch out in a couple of months, the hatchling turtles will come up at night. That helps them avoid frigatebirds, but these ghost crabs will happily kill and devour them.” About 80 percent of turtle eggs hatch. Hatchlings suffer horrifying mortality. Over the course of a life spanning fifty years, a female might nest in about eight seasons, laying thirty times, a lifetime total of three thousand eggs. Assuming there are as many males as females, a stable population requires that only two survive.
ONE BIG GREEN TURTLE—this one a male—is in our path, lying on the beach asleep. No animal looks more a geological feature, an outcrop of life. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine anything deader looking than a sleeping sea turtle. The first time you see one you’ll swear all life has left it. A wave catches the sleeping beast and the outwash begins sinking the creature’s drooped head and splayed flippers into the sand. Sand begins burying its mouth—and still the eyelids droop. Finally, as if only to prove it lives—and thereby underscoring how unlifelike it seems—it lifts its eyes-closed head and inhales. You’ll grow uncomfortable waiting for a sleeping turtle to take a breath. Don’t hold yours. they breathe about once every ten minutes. When they do, it’ll be a big gulp. The head will rise reflexively, because in a turtle’s oceanic world air is always above you, breath always something you must reach for.
We walk around behind him, continuing for another quarter mile. When we meet Julie and the turtle she has found—also male—all talk is in whispers. We drop our equipment, then huddle, deciding a strategy of approach. Julie explains that this turtle has a small tumor on his neck. He also appears to have a couple of very small white growths in the corners of his eyes; these may become tumors. She whispers, “Most turtle tumors appear around the head and neck because that’s where most of the soft tissue is.”
Vanessa softly says, “A lot are in the eyes, on the shoulders, in the jaw—”
Aaron and Vanessa, walk toward the turtle, which is about four and a half feet long. The animal is dry, not at all wet. His shell looks amazingly tough, thick, and rather rigid—almost mineralized. The skin-to-shell connection is very solid. Large scales on the flippers and head lessen the visual contrast between skin and shell. The skin itself is leathery, yet soft. What’s really remarkable is how even the scaliest part of the flippers seem soft. Even his meaty, prehensile tail—a foot long, nearly five inches in diameter at the base and thirteen inches around—is soft; I can easily feel the bony vertebral structure through it. His eyes are wet with tears, adding to his lugubrious sense of melancholy, but the tears are just to keep sand from his eyes. The turtle’s head is about the size of a softball. The tumor growing from his neck is olive-sized.
I ask whether the tumors are hard or soft. Aaron whispers, “They tend to be pretty soft and doughy.” He touches it.
I do the same. It feels fleshy, about the consistency of a grape.
Julie whispers, “This tumor looks new, and very vascular. A lot of times they’re just kind of bloody because they’re so big they get scraped on things. They usually look pretty raw. But this one is dry.”
Aaron suddenly volunteers to me, “There’s no real danger in touching them, but they often involve a herpes virus—so don’t touch your face. You’ll want to go back to the barracks and scrub your hands with antibacterial soap later.”
I’m no pathologist, but I know two things: one, herpes viruses are nasty and can be unpredictably contagious; and two, antibacterial soap has no effect against viruses. And now I feel very uncomfortable about my possibly contaminated hand. I wash it in an oncoming wave, then scour it with beach sand. Perhaps I’m being a bit of a hypochondriac. But if you can’t be a hypochondriac about touching strange, not fully explained wild-animal tumors that you’ve just been told could possibly transmit an infection to you, what can you be a hypochondriac about? I suddenly have a Beatles lyric running circles in my mind: “Hold you in his armchair you can feel his disease. / Come together / Right now / Over me.” I realize I’ve gained a more intimate sense of this creature’s affliction, odd though that seems.
They place their net on the sand before the turtle, then tap him to prompt him to chug forward onto it. This done, they gather the wide edges of the net atop the turtle’s shell, then lock the net into place with a carabiner. Encased in netting, the turtle is thus largely immobilized. But he is awake, and exceedingly powerful. He struggles but makes no attempt to bite. Aaron places a hood over the animal’s eyes to calm him, and sits holding his big head. He whispers to me, “This is a special part of my job. There’s a real specific technique of pressing your palms against their eyes very, very lightly—really gently—that makes them relax. And to have them react to you by going almost totally limp and calm—that’s a very neat feeling.”
Julie opens an equipment kit and hands Vanessa a spray bottle filled with Betadine disinfectant. Vanessa washes away some sand with water and applies the disinfectant to the base of the turtle’s neck, right where it meets the both. On the neck itself the skin is quite soft. She carefully palpates the skin, then inserts a needle fully, pulis it out partially, and inserts it a little farther, looking for the right spot. No blood comes. Without withdrawing it from the skin, she pulls the needle up and pushes it back in three times. Each attempt is a dry well.
I’m cringing at the sight of the needle going up and down, but the turtle is not acting as though it feels any pain With Aaron holding him, he is staying quite calm.
A bit exasperated. Vanessa removes the syringe, goes to the other side of the neck, palpates, sticks, and draws. Now the blood begins coming slowly but evenly into the syringe.
The blood will be analyzed for the comparison of chemical contamination between turtles with and without tumors. In a couple of months, after the nests hatch, they’ll dig out the remains of eggs laid by females with and without tumors, to compare how many hatched and how many didn’t. The blood will also be analyzed to see if it contains vitellogenin, a protein indicating the presence, of eggs. If it’s found in males, it shows that chemical contaminants like PCBs, DDT, and less familiar sounding compounds have been functioning in the animal’s body as mimics of female hormones. In offspring this can interfere with normal embryo development, sometimes causing individuals to be born “intersex”—half male, half female, a problem increasingly found in wildlife, and people, in various parts of the world.
There are many sounds in the night here: the waves and the birds, an occasional seal snort, the Bulwer’s Petrels like little hooting owls. And though it’s not quiet, all speaking—all speaking—remains whispered, making it almost impossible to hen unless you are close to a person who’s talking directly to you.
About every two minutes, this turtle breathes. With each inspiration of breath, his entire shell rises. The deep occasional sighs with winch he exhales sound labored. Weightless and winged as they are in water, sea turtles must feel unbearably heavy on land. He seems ineffably sad and tired, as though carrying the weight of the world. Hearing his breathing, it is easy to believe the mythology that a great turtle holds up the Earth.
With the blood drawn, Julie injects a tiny coded-wire tag in each of the animal’s rear flippers. From now on, this animal’s identity can be ascertained by merely waving the electronic wand.
The sky opens a little, liberating a few stars. The shrouded moon, waiting in the wings for its chance at another appearance, lights the outlines of some broken clouds.
This turtle weighs 230 pounds. Julie whispers in my ear, “We’ve seen some under two hundred, others over three.” Julie’s massive calipers tell us that the shell itself is 97 centimeters, a little over three feet long. The shell width is 76.7 centimeters, about two and a half feet wide. Aaron takes a portable handheld router and in a couple of strokes etches the number 11 on the shell, then sprays a little bit of paint over the number and wipes the shell.
While Julie is still transferring the blood samples into smaller vials, Nick, Vanessa, and Aaron lower the turtle, unclip the carabiner, and loosen the net. The turtle begins tractoring down the beach almost immediately. He stops near the water’s edge as though trying to remember what his original motives were. The turtle walks into the sea until only his tracks remain on land. But in addition to tracks, he leaves us clues to his condition and the health of the overall population.
Another turtle, much smaller, begins crawling onto the beach fifty feet from us like a bright, shining amphibious unit, newly arrived upon the beachhead, still awash in the wavelets massaging the shore. Julie checks with her light. This turtle has a small number 48 near the rear of her shell. Julie waves her magic wand across her rear flippers, and the magnetic tag number comes up on her little screen. She says to me, “She’s had everything done already. She’s probably coming up to lay eggs.”
We continue walking down the beach. Right now, we’re looking only for tumored turtles that haven’t already been tagged this season. If one has been tagged before, we just note who it is. If it has tumors and has not been worked on before, the team does its medical sampling.
The next turtle is another untagged male asleep on the beach, not quite beyond the reach of the highest breaking wave. This one has an unusually deformed, highly domed shell with a big concave dent running almost the whole length of one side. It has no tumor. We move on.
Fifty yards farther we come upon two more turtles, dry and dozy, separated by a few yards. They’re completely quiet, heads down in the sand, utterly immobile. Neither has any tumors. Both are just resting.
The tracks of nesting turtles go past the beach, up beyond the berm, into the brush. They’ve done some quite impressive bulldozing up under the bushes where the birds are roosting. Julie follows one fresh track that goes over the berm, scanning with the flashlight for the turtle. There she is: she’s dug a body pit but has not laid any eggs. She’s calm and quiescent and still. We check to see if she needs to be sampled later when she’s finished her mission. But she has no tumors. We leave her.
A few stars are shining in the south and overhead, and there’s enough moisture to create little halos around them, like in Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night. In the north, clouds cloak the horizon and lightning flashes every few minutes. The overall sense is of being on a speck of sand in a vast sea on a mysterious planet suspended in a great galaxy.
Up ahead, another male, more heavily tumored, lies on the beach, sleeping. When Aaron and Nick attempt to stimulate him onto the net, he doesn’t wake. They tap his shell and gently pull his tail. Yet he remains in resolute repose as though disembodied and departed. So they simply pull him up onto the net by his flippers. Still the turtle slumbers. Aaron and Julie work to clip the net in place.
This turtle has a tumor the size of a plum on his neck, plus a larger, knobby one on the right side of his head near the corner of his mouth and another knuckly one on the left side of his face.
When Julie inserts the blood-sampling needle, the turtle—now finally awake—tucks his head back. Julie waits a moment, then pulls back slowly on the plunger, and the syringe fills with dark blood.
The exact cause of this disease, and why turtles are now so affected by it, remains debated. Researchers have argued about whether the herpes virus that’s involved is a primary infection or a secondary problem. Though the viruses might be the direct cause of tumors on turtles, certain algal and cyanobacterium “blooms”—bursts of rapid reproduction in which so many cells are created that they color the seawater—may set the stage. Some of the blooms produce toxins such as okadaic acid, which promotes tumors in laboratory mice, and lyngbyatoxin, another tumor promoter. Sea turtles seem most beset by tumors in certain semienclosed bays and harbors where those toxin-producing organisms now bloom in unusual densities because of pollution.
Aaron points and shows, “Even though tumors usually erupt from the soft fleshy parts, not the surfaces with large scales, this turtle has tumors coming directly out of his face, involving the big scales of his head, as well as the soft scales on his neck.”
In slightly better light, I now realize that the tumor on the right side is bigger than I first thought—about the size of a peach. It bulges from his face in an overhanging shape from the mouth, growing over the hinge of the bottom jaw. Seeing so wonderful a creature so disfigured sickens me with sadness.
Julie palpates the tumors with her bare fingers. I’m thinking, Wear examination gloves. Using a U-shaped metal implement, Julie pries open the turtle’s jaws. He does not approve of this maneuver. Apparently, turtles don’t like dentists, Julie shines her headlamp into the balking animal’s mouth and, with much effort, ascertains that the oral interior is clear of tumors.
Julie and Vanessa confer about how to score the tumors in the notebook. They have a classification system according to size: A tumor the diameter of your little finger rates a I. Larger, up to the size of the circle your fingers form when you make the O.K. sign, is a 2. A3 is smaller than your fist, and a 4 is larger than your fist.
The team wants biopsy samples of these tumors. Aaron covers and holds the animal’s head. Julie switches her headlamp on. With a twisting motion she plunges the biopsy corer into the flesh between the foreflipper and the neck, right into the small tumor there. The turtle cringes, pulling back and thrusting his net-confined flipper forward in a hunching motion. When Julie goes for a second flesh sample, he again seems to feel this acutely, giving another sharp shrug.
Julie is working with her face very close to the animal. She’s precise with her actions. Considering that she’s only twenty-four, her confidence is impressive.
This smaller turtle weighs 177 pounds. Nonetheless, he’s extremely strong. Even through the netting, he somehow manages to get enough of his flipper dug into the sand to begin traveling down the beach, despite the fact that Aaron and Nick are trying to hold him back. An occasional wave washes up high enough to soak Nick, Aaron, and Julie, who are working at the front of the turtle, trying to measure his body dimensions.
As soon as they’re done measuring. they unclip the net and the turtle shoves himself into the dark waves.
I mention to Julie that those tumors horrified me.
She says, “Yeah—and I’ve seen far, far worse.”
Vanessa adds, “The really heavily tumored turtles don’t come here; we think they don’t have enough energy to make it this far.”
As we continue on. I’m walking alongside Aaron. He volunteers, “This is a pretty fantastic job, I think. I don’t like to be bossed around. I don’t like corporate structure. I’ve seen people abuse auth
ority—which has gotten me in trouble in the past. That’s why volunteer work is very appealing. this job is probably the best thing that’s ever happened to me. It’s going to bigger and better things, and the ability to do more of what I want to do.”
When we come upon two more sleeping unties, Aaron glances quickly at their shells. They’ve been marked; we don’t need any more data from these. A little farther along, Aaron checks an unmarked turtle. He takes care to avoid shining the light in its eves. Aaron checks carefully around the foreflippers, neck, and head. and under the shell around the rear flippers, working like a mechanic searching knowledgeably under a car. The verdict: clear and clean. We walk on.
About a hundred feet farther down the beach another turtle is lying on the sand. Aaron sweeps his dimmed flashlight to its shell, and I’m startled to see that a big piece of its left hind flipper is missing. The light goes up toward the turtle’s head, revealing that the left front flipper is also mostly gone below the wrist, leaving a fleshy, meaty wound. This is a shark attack. Aaron whispers, “This turtle’s been here the last few days.” The appalling wound looks potentially fatal, because it seems like so much of the turtle’s pulling power is gone. Aaron says, “There’s been a lot worse that turtles have survived. When we first saw this turtle a few days ago the wounds were extremely fresh, still bleeding. Now the wound on the rear left flipper looks like it’s dosed up.”
But the one on the front left flipper is still meaty and raw. All the flesh is clogged up with sand. It looks awful.
Aaron thinks that if they have the wrist joint they can survive. But he remembers a turtle with an entire foreflipper missing, its shell compressed with starvation. He found it dead a few days later in the same place.
