By Cameron Duke
Thousands of sea turtles (click here) were cold stunned when temperatures plunged in the Gulf of Mexico this week. Nearly 5,000 of the turtles (shown here) were rescued by a small army of volunteers and "dry-docked" on the floor of both Sea Turtle, Inc.'s rehabilitation facility and the South Padre Island Convention Centre.
"The turtles were surprised by the cold just like everyone else," Joseph Pechmann, a herpetologist with Western Carolina University, told Live Science.
...This is the largest cold-stunning event to occur in the U.S. since NOAA (click here) began keeping records on these events, Donna Shaver, coordinator of the Sea Turtle Stranding and Salvage Network, told National Geographic.
As of Friday (Feb. 19), nearly 7,000 green (Chelonia mydas), loggerhead (Caretta caretta) and Kemp's Ridley sea turtles (Lepidochelys kempii) had been rescued along the Texas coastline. Roughly 5,000 of those rescues occurred along the southernmost tip of that coastline near South Padre Island. All three species are listed as either threatened or endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Turtles typically cope with dropping temperatures by moving to warmer water. However, many turtles in this region live there year-round because of the typically mild climate; the temperature simply plunged too quickly for them to react....
