In case you haven’t got the message yet, our planet is heating up. Dangerously so. So dangerously that we have to dismantle our entire industrial society in order to avoid descending into a Venus-like planetary hellscape in just a few years.
It’s getting so hot in here that they’re freezing over in Texas.
But that’s nothing compared to the global-warming wave of frigid temperatures that are literally stunning sea turtles.
It took until the middle of January for true Arctic air to arrive in the United States, but despite a late onset of the harshest cold, aquariums and rehabilitation centers across the country have already been busy responding to hundreds of cold-stunned sea turtles.
To be sure, cold-stunning is not an unknown or unusual affliction for sea turtles. They are reptiles, after all.
Cold stuns typically happen when water temperatures drop below 50 degrees Fahrenheit, causing sea turtles to show signs of hypothermia. Experts say this typically happens in enclosed basins such as estuaries since major bodies of water don’t typically cool down that much.
Sea turtles are not able to regulate body temperature, so a sudden cold snap can turn fatal if the animals become lethargic and experience decreased circulation, causing other body functions slow down.
What’s different this year is the extent and severity of the cold-stunning event.
“[We have] critically cold-stunned turtles,” [Gulf World Marine Institute stranding coordinator Lauren Albrittan said. “What that means is most likely they have secondary infections or injuries or other illnesses other than just being too cold”[…]In total, the institute is currently treating 38 turtles from the New England area, but they were treating almost double that amount.
“We received three separate flights of sea turtles from both the New England Aquarium and the National Marine Life Center. We received a total of 69 sea turtles, and we’re fortunate. We’ve been able to release, so far, 20 of them,” Albrittan said.
The turtles were transported to the Gulf World Marine Institute by pilots who volunteer to use their own planes to fly turtles to recovery centers across the county through the organization Turtles Fly Too[…]
“The cold-stun effort this year has been extremely difficult, and we knew it going in one because weather patterns indicated that it was going to be duplicative of 2014,” Executive Director of Turtles Fly Too Bonnie Barnes said.
In recent years, NOAA reports, an average of 600 sea turtles have been found cold-stunned along the Cape Cod coast in Massachusetts from late October through December each year. In the winter of 2014, which Barnes mentioned, approximately 1,243 sea turtles washed up on Cape beaches, only 746 of those turtles were alive[..]
Turtles can even be cold stunned along the Texas coast, including the Upper Laguna Madre and Corpus Christi Bay, which NOAA says is an excellent habitat for green turtles. However, the Texas coast wasn’t an ideal habitat between December 2017 and January 2018 when more than 3,500 sea turtles, primarily juvenile green turtles, were rescued in the largest cold-stunning event ever recorded in Texas.
Accuweather
Global warming, is there anything it can’t do? From freezing wind turbines in Texas to cold-stunning sea turtles on the Gulf Coast, it’s getting so hot that we’re all freezing to death.
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