And some days you find yourself in a room full of endangered sea turtles, most of them flapping their front flippers, trying to find an escape route, trying to make their way back to the ocean. Even though the ocean wasn’t the best place for them to be just yet.
The turtles were all Kemp’s ridleys, the world’s smallest sea turtle species, also the most endangered. They are generally creatures of the Gulf of Mexico, with 95% of the population hatched in Mexico. But a significant number do wander from there. In recent years, for reasons largely attributed to climate change, they have been straying farther and farther, later and later into the year.
These turtles, 25 of them, had been victims of cold water stunning on the inside curve of Cape Cod, their cold-blooded bodies less and less functional as the water temperatures dropped. They were picked up off the beaches over several weeks by volunteers and staff from the New England Aquarium, collected and triaged at the Sea Turtle Hospital in Quincy, Massachusetts. When the tanks there filled with turtles, they were organized, loaded into towel-covered banana boxes and flown to Marathon by a nonprofit conservation group called NightHawk.
I was there on the tarmac to do some photo work when the banana boxes were transferred from the single engine turbo-prop to the waiting Turtle Hospital ambulance, but other than cardboard, terrycloth and the Chiquita logo, all you could really see was the occasional turtle nose sticking out through an air hole.
Down at the pistachio-colored former motel that is the Marathon Turtle Hospital, a crew of a dozen or so people, most in matching blue scrubs, carried the boxes inside, lined them up on the floor, and took the towels off.
The turtles were all young, about the size of oblong dinner plates, though Kemp’s ridley shells are deeply rounded, so maybe the size of small inverted soup tureens is a better description. All of them had a number and the name of an instrument (Viola, Banjo, Tuba, Ocarina) chalked in bright colors onto their shells, so the staff could tell them apart.
They were lifted one by one by gloved hands out of the banana boxes and placed into pre-labeled blue plastic tubs with matching blue blankets and blue file folders containing information about them as individuals. (One of the staff told me the blue towels come out when there will be a lot of cameras around.)
Over the next hour or so the individual turtles were weighed, measured, blood sampled, X-rayed and otherwise examined by the Turtle Hospital’s deft and efficient crew, under the watchful eye of manager Bette Zirkelbach. The more entertaining side plot was watching the turtles trying to crawl out of their tubs, sometimes succeeding and making it onto the floor or into a neighboring tub, but more often than not getting caught by a pair of hands just as they were about to do so, and being placed back into the middle of their tubs. (This may have been less entertaining to the folks who had to do all the hunched-over catching and resettling.)
The turtles were all later given swim tests, which they all passed. Nineteen of the turtles were found to be in good health, with the other six suffering from infections and lung damage brought on by the cold shock.
The goal is to release them all in the Cape Canaveral area in the next one to 12 months.
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I’ve always had a fondness for Kemp’s ridleys despite, I believe, never having seen one in the wild, largely because of hometown pride.
The Kemp’s part of the name comes from Richard Moore Kemp, a man who was born in Green Turtle Cay in 1825 and died in Key West in 1908. He is credited with rebuilding the Cypress House on Caroline Street after it burned in 1886. He is said to have liked planting palm trees. He may have owned a furniture store. A man named William Kemp is often credited with starting the sponging industry in Key West, but no one knows if they were related.
The rest of the details of Kemp’s life have been lost to history, except that in 1880 he came across a type of turtle he did not recognize, and he sent the specimen up to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.
Fishermen who sometimes caught Kemp’s ridleys often referred to them as “bastard turtles” they were thought to be a cross between green and loggerhead sea turtles. The folks at MCZ recognized Kemp’s specimen as its own species, one that had not been previously described to science. They named it in his honor, even giving it the scientific name, Lepidochelys kempii.
The name ridley is something of a riddle, as no one knows where it came from, though one theory is it is derived from the word riddle. (There’s a really good story from 1999 about all of this by some reporter who used to work for the Miami Herald named Nancy Klingener.) (Other fun fact: A Kemp’s ridley was the first turtle admitted to the Turtle Hospital in Marathon as a patient.)
Sometime in the late 1990s someone did a grave rubbing of Richard Kemp’s grave in the Key West Cemetery and sold it at a charity auction to raise money for turtle conservation. But it turns out it wasn’t Richard Kemp the turtle finder’s grave, it was his son’s. Kemp the turtle finder was buried in an unmarked plot.
Fran Ford, then-doyenne of the Florida Keys Audubon Society, as well as several other environmental groups, thought this was outrageous.
“There is no stone to rub,” Ford told Klingener. “He’s important and he belongs to us. He should have a stone.”
So she went out and raised donations for a $300 granite marker to be placed over his grave with the words:
RICHARD MOORE KEMP
Jan. 25, 1825
Feb. 8, 1908
KEMP’S Ridley / Lepidochlys kempii
In the middle is an engraving of the turtle. You can visit the grave yourself — assuming the city hasn’t recently declared it abandoned and resold it to someone else.
