At first, Durban lifeguard Owen Hlongwa had no idea that a “limp lump of something” that washed up recently on uShaka Beach was a tiny loggerhead turtle. Then he saw faint signs of life.
“I put it in a bucket of seawater and it started reviving,” said Hlongwa.
Soon afterwards a second hatchling, slightly injured, also washed ashore.
Both were taken to uShaka Sea World where they were revived in a specially designed hospital tank by senior aquarist, Karin Fivaz.
At just more than 40mm, the hatchlings were estimated to be two weeks old. Because it was the week of Valentine’s Day, the slightly injured hatchling was named Valentine. The other was called Ula, which is Irish for jewel of the sea.
Roving Reporters recently visited uShaka to start monitoring the rehabilitation process.
The first video shoot shows the two hatchlings floating aimlessly about their hospital tank mostly fin-by-fin, occasionally experiencing head-to-head collisions.
“It takes loggerheads up to six months to a year to learn to dive,” explained Fivaz. “This makes the young turtles very vulnerable to predators.”
Fivaz said it was likely the hatchlings had drifted down the warm Agulhas current from protected nesting grounds around Bhanga Nek, Black Rock, Sodwana or St Lucia in the iSimangaliso World Heritage site, more than 350km north of Durban.
Fivaz gave insight into the epic journey the hatchlings would have faced.
After emerging from eggs on a nesting beach far north, the hatchlings would have run the gauntlet of a multi-predator feeding frenzy as they dashed to the shore – a spectacle worth witnessing.
Besides thousands of ghost crabs and hundreds of seagulls and terns, many other predators feed on hatchlings including jackals, dogs and mongooses.
The odds of hatchlings reaching the shore are stacked against them. Those that do make it face greater danger as they enter the ocean. In shallow waters, they are preyed on by all kinds of fish, including sharks.
Once out in the ocean deep, a whole new set of challenges and dangers lurk – above and below the surface.
This includes larger turtle-eating fish, bigger sharks and birds, pollution and fishing trawlers.
Pollution is particularly a problem as turtles grow older. “They often mistake plastic bags for jellyfish,” said Fivaz.
This can block their digestive system, effectively starving them.
Given all these dangers, a loggerhead’s chances of survival into adulthood are slim. George Hughes, author of Between the Tides, in Search of Sea Turtles, puts the survival rate at 2 in a 1 000.
In his chapter, How Hatchlings live and Die and Other Dangers, Hughes also tells how upwellings of cold water from the ocean deep exact a toll on loggerhead turtle hatchlings.
While turtles thrive in warm water of between 20-26ºC, cold water renders hatchlings weak, unable to swim or feed.
This often causes hatchlings to be blown ashore, as is likely to have happened to Ula and Valentine, who were finally tossed and twirled through Durban’s surf and spat out on the beach.
For the first week, Valentine appeared to be recovering well, but has since died. Citing either infection or its original injuries, uShaka staff said given Valentine’s tiny size it was hard to know the exact cause of death.
Ula, however, is gaining weight and is expected to fully recover, alongside another hatchling, Sam, that washed ashore on the Bluff on February 21.
Both hatchlings have since been moved from quarantine to tanks open to public viewing.
Fivaz said that over the next 11 months, Ula and Sam will be pampered with prawns, sardines and uShaka’s “gel food” (fish mulch, gelatine and vitamins), while its surviving brethren in the oceans grow up on a diet of algae, sea grass, bluebottles and jellyfish.
Ula and Sam will be released back into the sea when they are a year old and about the size of a dinner plate.
Exactly what chance they will have of surviving in the ocean unaccustomed to many dangers at sea, is uncertain.
But given that Ula and Sam will, by then, be able to dive and swim, Fivaz reckons they should have as much chance of evading predators as any other young turtle, irrespective of whether it has been raised in captivity or not.
“At least they will have been assured a year’s survival which is a good head start over hatchlings in the ocean,” said Fivaz.
Last year, uShaka rehabilitated five turtle hatchlings, all of which were successfully released.
“Unfortunately, they were still too small to be tagged, so we can only wonder where they are now,” said uShaka spokeswoman, Ann Kunz.
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LOGGERHEADS NAVIGATE USING GPS
For a long time it has been a mystery how loggerhead turtles navigate thousands of kilometres, returning from feeding grounds to nest on the very beaches where they hatched 15 years previously.
But past chief executive officer of KZN Ezemvelo Wildlife, George Hughes, has provided some insight into this phenomenon, reckoning that sea turtles use lines of magnetic force, rather like GPS, to navigate where they are going.
This, says Hughes, appears to be the only sensible explanation for the sea turtles’ ability to traverse thousands of kilometres, from any direction, even across oceanic boundaries, and still find its way to its natal beach as an adult.
Hughes, who dedicated most of his adult life to monitoring and researching sea turtles, has written a book Between The Tides, In Search of Sea Turtles, in which he expands upon this concept.
“My own theory,” writes Hughes, “is based on the fact that the turtle hatchling takes approximately two months to develop in the egg before hatching.
“During this period the mechanism for setting the co-ordinates of the nesting beach, wherever it may be, fixes the global position in the body of the turtle.”
Hughes states that if properly hard-wired, the turtle will automatically find its way back to where it was born, just as it automatically knows how to dig a nest and lay eggs.
“What is even more surprising is that turtles, certainly loggerheads, appear to be able to fix the co-ordinates of their feeding grounds later in life.
“This is especially impressive as these feeding grounds may be thousands of kilometres from the beaches from which they first emerged,” writes Hughes.
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LOGGERHEAD FACTS
* Loggerhead females nest up to three to four times a season, laying up to 120 eggs in each nest between October and February. In the process they lose up to 25 percent of their body weight.
* Loggerhead turtle eggs take 45-55 days to hatch.
* Out of every 1 000 loggerhead hatchlings that enter the sea, only about two reach maturity.
* Loggerhead hatchlings in southern Africa are dependent on the southward flowing Agulhas Current for distribution. After their epic journeys as hatchlings and juveniles around the southern Indian Ocean, young loggerheads are brought back by the currents to the mainland coasts of Africa and Madagascar.
* Young loggerheads explore the oceans as they are chased by adult turtles that have a habit of defending feeding territories.
* African loggerhead feeding grounds are distributed far north along the east coast of Africa, Madagascar, Seychelles and the Mascarene islands (Mauritius, Reunion and Rodriguez).
* After mating and nesting in northern KwaZulu-Natal and Mozambique, loggerheads travel up to 40km every day for about two months in returning to their feeding grounds.
* It takes up to 15 years for a female loggerhead to mature, after which she usually returns to nest on the same beach on which she hatched.
* Loggerheads are named for their relatively large heads, which support powerful jaws that enable them to feed on hard-shelled prey.
* The greatest cause of decline and the continuing threat to loggerhead turtle populations worldwide is incidental capture in commercial fishing operations, including longlines, gillnets and trawlers. A report by Conservation International states that in the past 18 years, it is likely that millions of marine turtles have been killed as by-catch by the world’s fisheries.
* In 2011, a Manguzi resident, Makotikoti Zikhali, was given a five-year jail sentence for killing a loggerhead turtle in the iSimangaliso Wetland Park.
These turtle facts were taken from George Hughes’ recent book, Between the Tides, in Search of Sea Turtles
Roving Reporters
* Xolo and Nsele are Durban University of Technology graduate journalism students undergoing environmental journalism training with Roving Reporters.
This story forms part of a Roving Reporters’ series: People at Work Saving Sea Turtles