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After decades of rescuing stranded sea turtles, NOAA’s Galveston lab plans to scale back

October 22, 2018 — The sea turtle was almost dead, stranded at the high tide line on a Galveston beach.

It had a thick coating of algae growing on its outer shell. Its body was thin, its eyes sunken. It wasn’t moving.

A beachgoer spotted the creature earlier this month and called a hotline for reporting stranded sea turtles. As soon as the phone rang, the NOAA Fisheries laboratory in Galveston sprang into action.

An employee collected the 40-pound turtle from the beach and brought it back to the lab. It was a Kemp’s ridley turtle — a critically endangered species — and it didn’t look good.

“It was basically one step away from being comatose,” said Ben Higgins, who manages the sea turtle program at the Galveston lab. “At one point, the staff came and got me and said, ‘We think it might be dead.’”

But it wasn’t dead. The NOAA staff put the turtle in a van and drove it to Houston. By the next morning, the turtle was sprawled out on an exam table at the Houston Zoo, letting senior veterinarian Dr. Joe Flanagan prod at it with purple-gloved fingers. The turtle got X-rays, blood work and a full physical exam.

The diagnosis: Dehydration and a touch of pneumonia.

“We got it just in time,” Higgins said. “It was very close to leaving us.”

But with some squid in its system and a prescription for antibiotics, the turtle was taken back to Galveston to recover in NOAA’s lab.

It’ll spend the winter in the lab, getting food and medicine and a heated tank. And if all goes well, it will be released back into the Gulf of Mexico sometime after the winter, when it can survive in the wild again.

Read the full story at the Houston Chronicle

Loggerhead sea turtles aid in NOAA research to protect the species

June 16, 2016 — PANAMA CITY, Fla. — Paris Janos visited Ben Higgins from the Galveston National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Lab on Wednesday Morning. Higgins is conducting research on Panama City Beach this month to help protect sea turtles.

Researchers are working on Turtle Excluder Devices, or TED’s.

“Tens of thousands of sea turtles were drowning each year in shrimp trawls before the Turtle Excluder Device [TED] was invented and made mandatory in 1989,” Higgins told Paris. “Each year we look at new and improved ted designs with the aim of making sure the very best technology is being used by the fisheries to save sea turtles.”

NOAA’s Panama City Beach lab has 220 loggerhead sea turtles on site, including 160 two-year-old and 60 yearlings.

Read the full story at ABC Panama City

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