Turtle washed up on Irvine beach dies
Marine experts at the Scottish Sea Life Sanctuary have lost their battle to save the life of a loggerhead sea turtle that was found stranded on the beach at Irvine at the weekend.
Aquarist Anna Price was devastated to discover that the turtle – christened Harley after the dog that found him – had died overnight.
Harley’s condition was critical when he arrived at the Sanctuary. His body temperature had plummeted from the normal 23 degrees to a mere 10 degrees, and a veterinary check confirmed he was hypothermic and badly dehydrated.
He was given vital fluids intravenously and Anna and her colleagues had begun very gradually raising Harley’s temperature, by just a degree each day, so as not to send him into shock.
“Initial signs were encouraging,” said curator Mark Hind. “From being completely inert on arrival, he had begun to move his eyes very slightly and after a gentle salt bath yesterday even moved his flippers a little.
“We were hopeful he would eventually make a full recovery, and everyone at the Sanctuary is bitterly upset that we were not able to save him.”
A full post mortem will be carried out to see if Harley had other problems besides having succumbed to the cold.
He had a stunted front right flipper which may have been part of the reason for him drifting far north from his trans-Atlantic migration in the Gulf Stream.
Loggerheads from North America migrate right across the Atlantic, beyond the Canary Islands, to the coastal waters of North Africa and back again.
Sea turtles are also notoriously prone to getting sick through ingesting plastic bags, mistaking them for jellyfish, and occasionally from swallowing fish-hooks.
“We don’t know how long Harley had lain unnoticed on a very quiet stretch of the beach at Irvine, and he may have been there for days,” said Mark. “It’s quite feasible that help just didn’t arrive soon enough.
The full post mortem results will take around a fortnight to come through, and in the meantime Mark and Anna have issued an appeal for Scottish beach walkers to be on the alert in case there are other stranded turtles, and to contact the Sanctuary immediately should any be found.