NORTH SHORE NEWS (North Vancouver, British Columbia) 04 November 10 Restoring the Gulf, one turtle at a time (James Weldon)
Before Kate Cooper went to the Gulf of Mexico to help with the rescue of sea turtles there, she had been inundated by the same images as the rest of us: a sprawling oil slick, poisoned beaches, wildlife coated in toxic goo. But there was one surprise awaiting her there that she didn’t see coming.
“I didn’t expect to like turtles as much as I did,” said Cooper, in a recent interview with the North Shore News.
The West Vancouver native was one of four veterinary technicians from the Vancouver Aquarium who volunteered in recent weeks to help in the rehabilitation of marine animals affected by BP’s disastrous oil spill. Cooper, 23, spent two weeks at the end of October at the Audubon Aquatics Center just outside New Orleans. In her time there, she saw about 35 of the creatures released back to the wild of the several hundred treated at the facility.
So far, the centre has only lost two — no small feat, given what some of them had gone through.
“From what I understand, the ones who were oiled were extremely heavily oiled,” said Cooper. “One of the vets there described it to me as looking like they had been dipped in chocolate mousse.”
The collapse of BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in April created an underwater gusher that released close to five million barrels of crude oil into the ocean, severely impacting on the area’s fauna.
“What they were finding was a lot of these turtles had started actually ingesting the oil,” said Cooper. “The way a turtle breathes is it comes to the surface and opens its mouth and gulps in air . . . and if their prey species are oiled as well that will lead to them consuming it, . . . which obviously is harmful for them.”
As part of its multi-billion-dollar cleanup effort, the oil company hired local fisherman to scour the gulf for distressed animals, including sea turtles, and deliver them to the various rehabilitation centres that had sprung up along the coast.
Specialists at the Audubon centre cleaned the turtles and dolphins brought to them that way and rehabilitated them at their inland facility, essentially a warehouse filled with black plastic tubs and several pools. The society handled a variety of turtle species, including green, hawksbill, loggerhead and Kemp’s Ridley, the most critically endangered sea turtle in the world.
By the time Cooper arrived several months into the effort, the collecting and cleaning processes were complete. What remained was to keep the turtles alive until they could be released. Recovery for each animal took several months.
Each day, Cooper would show up to work at around 7 a.m. and give the centre’s 75 remaining the turtles their food and medication, and feed one of its two bottlenose dolphins, which she had been put in charge of.
She would then assist the veterinarian in treating any wounds and checking the animals over generally for signs of ill health. Cooper would also help take blood samples, perform radiographs, weigh the animals and update medical files. The work would keep her there until about 6 p.m.
A clean bill of health was not enough by itself to get a turtle released, however.
“It’s not just: ‘OK, this turtle is doing well; I can go put it in the ocean,’ ” said Cooper. “There’s lots of red tape.”
For one thing, the centre had to be sure it wasn’t putting the animals back into the poisonous soup they had come from.
“They were paying very close attention too that,” said Cooper. “They had a list of criteria that was evaluated on, I think, a weekly basis as to whether the area was going to be OK to release these animals back into.
“They (had to) make sure the oil had dispersed and make sure there weren’t effects on the prey species for these animals so they were actually going to be able to go out there and eat.”
Some of the animals were ultimately transferred to the Florida coast to get them away from the spill.
The job kept Cooper busy close to 12 hours a day, seven days a week, meaning she didn’t even have a chance to see the gulf itself. She has no complaints, however.
“It was a wonderful experience,” said Cooper. “Everybody down there was so nice and . . . very well educated. . . . And Louisiana was actually a very beautiful state to visit. I didn’t expect that.”
While Cooper was technically a volunteer with Audubon, the Vancouver Aquarium paid her her regular wage while she was down there.
Cooper is back at work now in the aquarium’s own animal health department, where she deals primarily with orphaned seal pups, but her time in New Orleans has left her with an interest in the reptilian.
“I would love to be involved with sea turtles specifically,” she said. “Unfortunately, that would probably require me to move, so I don’t know if that will be in my future or not — but definitely if the opportunity arose. They’re a very interesting species.”
Restoring the Gulf, one turtle at a time