More than 500 baby sea turtles were left stranded on South African beaches after a rare and powerful storm, prompting their rescue by an aquarium, officials said.
An aquarium in South Africa is stretched beyond capacity after more than 500 baby sea turtles were washed up on beaches by a rare and powerful storm and rescued by members of the public. The little turtles are mostly endangered loggerheads and should be cruising the ocean. Most of them instead will spend the first few months of their lives in newly built plastic tanks at the Turtle Conservation Center at the Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town.
In South Africa, loggerheads hatch on the northeast coast on the far side of the country from Cape Town. These turtles were likely sucked in by the warm Indian Ocean Agulhas Current, carried around the tip of South Africa and spat out in the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean near Cape Town. That's fairly common, said Talitha Noble-Trull, the head of the Turtle Conservation Center. She's in charge of treating the new arrivals.
Many of the turtles had ingested small pieces of plastic, which exited their systems after they arrived at the aquarium. Noble-Trull has a tray of plastic pieces collected in just one day, some as big as a fingernail. The conservation team normally wouldn't see that amount of evidence of plastic pollution in the ocean. Turtles spend almost all their lives in the ocean, apart from when they're born and when females return to shore to lay eggs.
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