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PRESS OF ALTLANTC CITY (New Jersey) 15 June 05 Turtle found ‘dead’ in crab trap revives in refrigerator (Richard Degener)
Middle Township: Hans Toft figures Lazarus may have seen the white light and swam the other away.
All the high school science teacher knows for sure is that Lazarus, a diamondback terrapin turtle, survived a brush with death.
Toft, a natural sciences teacher here at the Cape May County Technical High School, hopes the tale will save other diamondback terrapins that get stuck in crab traps.
The story began last Friday when Toft's class was checking one of its crab traps on Great Sound. Although the trap has what is known as a "turtle excluder device," somehow a big female, with a shell about eight inches wide, managed to get into the trap.
The aquatic turtle that lives in brackish water, and is considered a threatened species in New Jersey, wasn't moving. She appeared dead. When terrapins get stuck in crab traps they can't surface for air and they eventually drown. Toft said that is one reason he checks the crab traps every day.
"It was dead and I was very upset. I blew breath into it, which I didn't think would do any good, but I did it to gross my students out," Toft said.
Because Lazarus was bearing eggs, Toft decided to bring her back to the school and extract them. A program at the Wetlands Institute takes eggs out of terrapins killed crossing roads, hatches them in the lab and then releases the baby turtles back into the wild.
It was Friday afternoon, so Toft chucked the turtle into a refrigerator, figuring he would deal with it later. On Sunday, he came into the classroom to check whether the blueclaw crabs had molted, and he opened the refrigerator door to find a live turtle. Lazarus was moving.
But the turtle would not open its eyes, so he put it in a dry aquarium hoping it would thaw out. On Monday morning, the class arrived to find a fully revived turtle. Somehow, Toft said Lazarus "restarted her engine."
On Tuesday afternoon, Lazarus was released back into Great Sound at the very same spot where she was caught and feared dead four days earlier.
"I thought it was dead. There was no motion at all on Friday, and today it swam away, trying to bite me," Toft said.
There might be some lessons to be learned. Toft said crabbers might be pulling seemingly dead terrapins out of traps every day. If they throw them in the water in such a state, they could drown. If they throw them on the bank, the gulls will eat them.
Toft isn't sure if the time in a 48-degree refrigerator helped or whether the key was just time passing while the turtle revived itself. All he knows for sure is this particular turtle didn't go to the white light.
Turtle found ‘dead’ in crab trap revives in refrigerator

This guy is an idiot. A terrible role model for children. It is an embarassment to the school district that he is a science teacher.

Why do you say that? Other than waiting too long to remove the eggs from a seemingly dead turtle, what do you think he did wrong? Even herp vets sometimes have a hard time telling a dead reptile from a live one, unless they have it hooked up to a heart monitor. One vet I know says to leave the animal "until it smells" to make sure it's really dead before giving up on it. Many herp vets will euthanize a reptile by giving it an injection of pentabarbital and after the animal is unresponsive, putting it in the freezer, just to be on the safe side, because some clients have been given their "dead" herp that was euthanized with pentabarbital alone, only to have thier animal wake up before burial!

Katrina