I’m back from another successful day of surveying our Texas beaches for sea turtles, cleaning out monofilament bins and talking all things turtles with the public!

Yesterday’s turtle survey was really special because I was able to help load up and deliver 5 sea turtles to the RV Manta (a sanctuary vessel used by the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary).

The RV Manta ready for its’ expedition as the sun starts to rise.

The Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles were headed offshore so they could start their life post-rehabilitation in a safe location. The day began around 5:00am when the NOAA biologists packed the turtles that were given the OK by our head vet, Dr. Joe at the sea turtle barn in Galveston. Each turtle is placed in its own plastic tub (with lots of holes for them to breathe!) and sandwiched between two wet towels. These towels keep the turtles damp (we don’t want them to dry out on the ride offshore) and also maintains their body temperature since they are cold-blooded animals!

A Kemp’s ridley sea turtle ready to greet the great-wide-open water!

 Three of the five turtles that were released yesterday were caught on hook and line off of our local jetties, piers and popular fishing areas. The remaining two turtles were Kemp’s Ridley hatchlings from last summer that spent the year in captivity getting big and strong! All 5 turtles were extremely feisty and demonstrated very well that they were ready to be out of captivity and back in the Gulf!

All 5 turtles ready to go!

Thanfully, we did not see any injured or dead turtles yesterday and we didn’t receive any calls about turtles either! We were also very happy with the amount of fishing line we collected from the recycling bins on the Surfside jetty…and unfortunately a lot from the jetty rocks as well.

So much fishing line!

We even found a huge net wrapped around one of the jetty rocks-we were glad that we could pull it up and recycle it so it won’t be able to ever come into contact with our local marine life.

Large net wrapped around the jetty rocks-this can be very dangerous to marine life

We are certainly making progress, but there is a lot more that can be done to help save sea turtles and other similar marine species. We constantly see trash and recyclable items lining the rocks that could easily be discarded if trash cans were more accessible along the jetty.

A sea of plastic. If everyone picked up just 2 items every time they visited our Texas beaches, we would have a much cleaner area to enjoy!

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