![]() ![]() ![]() Now, squeezed into the back of Pringle’s SUV, wearing sneakers, cargo shorts, and a blue aquarium T-shirt speckled with sweat, he knelt above one of the biggest turtles he’d seen, hoping this one had a chance. And then I realized very quickly as a kid that baby birds, no matter what you did, they always died. Just getting one across the road, or keeping a raccoon from gnawing it, or holding it long enough so it could heal from a wound. They were one of the animals that, as a kid, I could help. “Everyone has a connection to a turtle,” Boylan said one evening after work. He used modified endotracheal tubes that he’d brought from work to help them breathe, the turtles on blankets next to his bed, his phone alarm going off every fifteen minutes so he could wake up and pump air into the mouths of little Kemp’s ridleys, some of the most endangered sea turtles, trying to keep them alive through the night. In the early days, before the aquarium had two floors devoted to care, Boylan, who is now forty-four, would sometimes take injured turtles home with him. During his time there, the turtle center has evolved from having one microscope and barely any room for patients to a place with huge new exhibits and a modern med lab, with an ultrasound and a CT scanner imported from Italy that Boylan nicknamed Megatron. Its first full-time vet, he now presides over one of the most modern turtle hospitals in the United States. Sea turtles have never stopped surprising Boylan in his twelve years at the aquarium. They loved to have their shells scratched with a squeegee. It had become a tradition at the aquarium, a way to remember their idiosyncrasies and scars. Ripley was the turtle with the gnarly spinal injury Little Pritchard had a stingray barb in his elbow joint Barrington, struck in the head by a boat, required surgery on his brain.īo ylan had always been a fan of naming the turtles. Pirate was ninety-eight pounds of pale green skin, with lockjaw and parasites in her intestines. Channel had a crack near the bottom of her shell. Stinky was the first sea turtle brought to the aquarium, bloated from an internal infection and rehabbed in a plastic kiddie pool because there wasn’t a turtle tank when the building opened, in 2000. Two hundred and seventy-five sea turtles over the course of nineteen years, rehabilitated at the South Carolina Aquarium in Charleston and released back into the ocean: Kemp’s ridleys, leatherbacks, loggerheads, and greens, all listed as either endangered or threatened. They had fishing hooks lodged in their mouths, their long reptilian tongues occasionally rising out of their jaws as though they were trying to speak. They sighed, turtle sighs, as if their patience in humans had worn thin. They had yellow-gray eyelids that opened slowly, and black eyes in the folds underneath, eyes that had always known the ocean-the depths of it, the miles of it-and reflected under hospital lighting the kind of ancient wisdom of whatever it was they had seen. Their shells had been hit by boat propellers, carving howling red divots into the tops of their backs. They had leeches marauding the wounds in their scales. They had flippers with chunks missing in the shape of shark bites. ![]()
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