Biologists Track Three-Legged Sea Turtle from Space

This week, a sea turtle hospital in Florida released a rare Kemp’s ridley sea turtle back into the sea after its months-long rehab. The turtle, which the Loggerhead Marinelife Center named Amelie, had had her right forelimb amputated after a traumatic injury. The vets will monitor Amelie’s travels from space.

Amelie, an 82-pound adult female, was brought to the center in early February after an apparent run-in with a shark. She had surgery to clean and stabilize the injury and was treated for pneumonia at the Juno Beach hospital. An ultrasound revealed that, on top of everything else, Amelie is carrying eggs.

“After several weeks of care and monitoring in our hospital, Amelie has made a strong recovery and has now been cleared for release back into the ocean,” the center posted on Facebook. “We will also be fitting her with a satellite tracker through our collaboration with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.”

Amelie is in fact the fourth amputee tracked by the center. A three-limbed turtle named Pyari has traveled nearly 700 miles since her release in January, according to the center’s loggerhead research director Sarah Hirsch.

“We do know that they can be successful in the wild because we have seen them on our nesting beaches, but we really want to understand their dive behaviors, how they’re migrating once they’re back in the wild,” Hirsch tells the AP.

Amelie’s return to the wild commenced on Juno Beach this week, when she plodded across the sand, paused for a half minute while a small crowd watched and cheered from a distance, then made the plunge into the surf. Witness the moment here.

“They’ve been through a lot,” says Hirsch. “They’ve gotten a lot of medical care here, and to see them be able to go back out and contribute to the population is really rewarding.”

These amputee turtles, and many fully-limbed ones as well, are wearing tags equipped with a “saltwater switch” that activates when the turtle surfaces, triggering the transmission of data to the satellites. Their location appears online after a 24-hour delay.

Photo credit: Loggerhead Marinelife Center via Facebook