Yes, New York City Has Sea Turtles and Seals, and Some Awesome People Are Rescuing Them
Marine wildlife is thriving in the country’s biggest metropolitan area, and a rescue group is working to keep it that way.
By: Emily J. Gertz
Stranded sea turtles usually start appearing along the Northeast coast of the United States in late November, as the animals that did not make it south in time to avoid falling ocean temperatures become hypothermic and unable to swim or feed. But in the fall of 2015, said marine biologist Rob Di Giovanni, “turtles started to increase more in early December. Maybe because of the climate we had at the time” — it was the world’s warmest November and December on record — “we had animals come in alive on the 23rd of December, still able to be revived.“
As the executive director of the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation, Di Giovanni runs the only organization in New York licensed to assess and pick up stranded seals, dolphins, and sea turtles — all protected species under federal law — from the state’s 2,625 miles of coastlines, beaches, bays, and estuaries.
Nursing marine animals back to health takes skill, dedication, and money. But the group’s challenge is to get the word out that Long Island’s beaches — despite being nestled in the nation’s most densely populated metropolitan area and best known as a summer party destination — are also habitat for wild animals that need special treatment when they show up onshore.
“Education and outreach are among the biggest things we can do to let people know they’re here, that they’re protected,” said Di Giovanni. “Maybe people are seeing animals but just assuming that they’re not there, so sightings go unreported.”
Walking along a Long Island beach in early February, Di Giovanni pointed to the “wrack line”: a jumbled band of seaweed, shells, and trash running parallel to the waterline, thrown dozens of feet inland by the high tide. This was where cold-stunned sea turtles typically turned up, he said, although it takes an attentive eye to spot a brown-green animal lying, probably motionless, in the brown-black tangles of sea kelp and driftwood.
“After high tide, walk the beach and look at the wrack line for something unusual,” said Di Giovanni. “If you find a turtle, don’t move it. Don’t touch it. Make sure it’s secure, and then find a stick to mark where the animal is,” so that rescuers can find it — because each length of beach looks much like another. And always call in the sighting, Di Giovanni stressed, because hypothermic turtles may appear dead but may still be saved, while dead turtles can provide scientists and wildlife managers with valuable information.
We were not spotting any sea turtles on this day — it was late in the stranding season to find survivors, said Di Giovanni. But we were seeing plenty of litter. As we walked and talked, we steadily filled a kitchen can–size garbage sack with cigarette butts, plastic shopping bags, tangles of fishing line, and other plastic trash, along with beer and soda cans.
“This might not seem like it did a lot, but it made a difference,” said Di Giovanni as he tossed the bag into the backseat of his car. “If you weren’t writing this story, that’s one bag of garbage that would still be on this beach.”
Marine plastic trash has become so abundant and so widespread that scientists are calling it a global crisis for ocean life. One of the worst things he has seen in decades of marine animal rescue, Di Giovanni said, was a dead dolphin with plastic debris spilling out of its mouth.
In 2002, Riverhead rescuers picked up a seal entangled in four pounds of plastic fishnets and line; a picture of the animal features prominently in the Riverhead Foundation’s educational exhibit at the Long Island Aquarium, where it is based.
“Marine debris is something we always see in our animals, and it’s not going away,” said biologist Samantha Rosen, the Riverhead Foundation’s education coordinator, who organizes several beach cleanings a month through the group’s new “Pick It Up” program.
Rosen, now in her mid-20s, first got interested in marine mammals when her mother brought her to a whale autopsy “with the people who are now my bosses,” she said. She went on to volunteer with the group, then interned while studying biology at a nearby college, and joined the staff about two and a half years ago.
“You’re excited that you get to work with these animals,” she said, “and nervous because you want to save them.”
The Riverhead Foundation gets an average of 200 hotline calls a year. In 2015 its rescue teams, which include staff and volunteers, responded to calls about 71 stranded seals and 24 cetaceans — dolphins, whales, and porpoises. Less then halfway into 2016, the group has rescued more than a dozen seals.
Of the 34 turtles Riverhead picked up during the 2015–16 stranding season, there are 11 survivors: 10 green sea turtles and one Kemp’s ridley, all endangered species. They swim in two sizable standing pools in the group’s animal care area, a warehouse-size expanse behind the aquarium’s exhibition space that also houses more than a dozen wood-walled enclosures for rescued seals, each with a small tank of circulating water. Plexiglas portholes allow staff to check on the patients without adding to the animals’ stress.
