Weather is stunning for Florida turtles sent into coma by the chill

Jacqui Goddard Times Online 14 Jan 10;

A mass rescue was continuing yesterday for more than 2,000 endangered sea turtles that were shocked into a coma by freezing weather in Florida.

Temperatures may be rising after the rare cold weather but scores of turtles are still being found unconscious on beaches and in lagoons.

A phenomenon known as “cold stun” sets in when water temperatures drop below 50F (10C) because the turtles cannot regulate their metabolism. More than 750 were taken to the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, at the Nasa Kennedy Space Centre.

“We’ve seen cold-stun events before but never on this scale. This is ten times the normal magnitude,” said Terry Norton, the director and veterinary surgeon at the Georgia Sea Turtle Centre in Jekyll Island.

“We’ve been warming them up in kiddie pools,” he said, adding that workers had to partition the enclosures to prevent them from fighting when their strength returns.

“They can become aggressive towards each other . . . there’s definitely some flapping of flippers,” Dr Norton said. “These turtles would have died without intervention. Some of them were sitting on the beach for a while and weren’t found for a while so the birds started pecking on them.”

The turtles, some weighing as much as 150lb (68kg), were taken to rehabilitation centres including SeaWorld in Orlando and Gulf World Marine Park in Panama City, Florida. It is expected that most will recover and be released.

Temperatures in Merritt Island’s lagoons dropped to 43F and there were reports of brief snow flurries in Orlando and Miami.

The conditions led to about 400 manatees, also known as sea cows, swimming into warm water canals near power plants. Hundreds of thousands of farmed tropical fish died, hundreds of birds, including pelicans, were taken to shelters and wildlife centres were inundated with calls about iguanas dropping from trees.

Some hit car windscreens after being frozen into a trance-like state. One newspaper ran a guide entitled How to Handle a Frozen Iguana.

In the Everglades, where numbers of Burmese pythons have been increasing in recent years, licensed hunters were urged by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission to use the change in weather to catch them.