Kalaʻi Miller / Home is Here Aloha, I’m Kalaʻi Miller.
Hawaiian green sea turtles or honu, are the most common species of turtles found in the
islands.
In fact, Hawaiʻi is just one of three places in the entire world where sea turtles come
onto the beach to bask in the sun.
Although honu are protected by state and federal laws, a number of threats continue to harm
the population.
In Māʻalaea, Maui a small team is working to care for sick and injured turtles, to get
them back into the ocean.
(instrumental music)
Chanel Browne / Sea Turtle Program Coordinator Sea turtles or honu in general are super significant
to Hawaiian culture.
So, if we're looking at it from a public scale our community, why should we care, because
we've always cared.
We've always loved our wildlife, we've always wanted to give back, this is an opportunity
to kind of show that you know, we see our animals, we see that they're getting hurt
from the things that we do.
Our organization is Maui Ocean Center Marine Institute.
We are a nonprofit organization here on Maui that does sea turtle rescue, coral restoration,
and various threat mitigation projects on island.
We also work with various education departments here, as well as local fishermen and people
in the community.
Morgan Gardner / Sea Turtle Technician So, everything in the ocean is an ecosystem.
It's all going to work together to keep running, keep everything happy, and healthy.
And turtles are a really important part of the ecosystem in all of the oceans of the
world.
Chanel Browne / Sea Turtle Program Coordinator So, our organization runs a 24-hour stranding
hotline, where you can call in any sick or injured or even dead sea turtle and we will
go out and respond.
We get calls every single day from people in the public, tourists, community members.
And this is also a great way for us to build relationships with them.
But without this hotline, you know, there are so many areas that we wouldn't even have
known that there were stranded or sick sea turtles.
It's really a big partnership with those all around us.
After we receive a phone call, we move pretty quickly.
We'll pack up our car or truck with all of the gear that we need.
We'll head straight to that beach.
Most of the time our responses are in water.
So, we'll have our snorkel gear, we'll have our raft and we actually go out and do all
the responses ourselves.
We'll get the turtle up onto the raft, bring it into shore, then we'll bring the sea turtle
back to our facility where we can treat it determine whether or not it gets released
or becomes a rehab patient.
The greatest threat to sea turtles here on Maui that we've seen through our work is
different types of interactions with fishing gear.
So, fishing line entanglements and foul hooking, or hooking in the mouth are some examples.
So this large nest of fishing line came from one sea turtle.
Um, the bobber included.
We do see this pretty commonly here in Hawaiʻi.
Um, just because of the amount of recreational fishing that we do have.
We’ve definitely seen cases of line ingestion or hook ingestion.
Just this year we started doing necropsies, so we’ve been able to see unfortunately
that is the cause of death for some of these sea turtles.
McKenzie Mungai / Sea Turtle Conservation Technician
This turtle is Mistletoe.
This turtle came to us with a bilateral entanglement around both front flippers.
What that basically means is that there was fishing gear, fishing line very tightly wrapped
around these both front flippers.
So, these are the two main focal points that we're actually treating here in our rehabilitation
facility.
The way that we're going to treat Mistletoe is with conservative laser therapy.
So, this is a laser that we're going to use here on our sea turtle patients.
And first off, its antimicrobial, so it's going to be able to clean that wound.
Second off, it's going to be able to reduce pain and inflammation.
And third off, it's going to help with tissue regrowth, so it's actually going to help to
be able to regrow a lot of the tissue inside this actual strangulation wound.
Morgan Gardner / Sea Turtle Technician But it's a really cool therapy because it's
super non-invasive, it doesn't involve us to have to really put anything into the turtles,
which is nice.
Especially with like medications, it's hard to get a turtle to take pills.
So, next we do topical treatments which is just on the skin on the surface so we use
betadine, a common antiseptic used in veterinary medicine.
It is really going to help clean out that wound to make sure there's nothing in there.
And we also have a silver ointment that's an antibacterial and then that we put in the
wounds.
McKenzie Mungai / Sea Turtle Conservation Technician
So we treat over 200 sea turtles every single year and about 87-percent of the turtles that
come to us have come to us with injuries pertaining to interactions with fishing gear.
As far as the severity of the actual wound on these flippers, it ranges from just very
superficial, so sometimes it doesn't even break that skin.
Sometimes, the fishing line is just there, it's wrapped around, but we're going to be
able to cut that and then immediately release that turtle that same day.
But in most of our cases, range from moderately severe to severe.
So, that means that some of the skin might have been broken.
The most severe cases are actually all the way down to the bone.
So, their humerus bones are very thin in sea turtles.
So, you have to be very careful not to break them, but they can break them themselves as
well.
So that being said, sometimes we do have turtles that come in here with a self-amputation.
So, they might have amputated their own flipper, just from that fishing gear.
Chanel Browne / Sea Turtle Program Coordinator We also deal with various types of responses
some, a little more common than others, like getting stuck in the rocks or stuck in the
sand.
We deal a lot with boat hits unfortunately as well.
Other types of responses that we do could be to for disease.
So, the goal for us is to, get in these sick and injured animals, make sure they get the
care that they need, get nicely rehabilitated and the end goal is always to get them back
out into the water.
When a sea turtle is getting ready to be released, we do something called pre-release.
We will actually give the sea turtle its last dose of antibiotics.
And then we will tag it in a number of different ways.
So, the first way is we do PIT tags.
PIT tags are passive integrative transmitters.
They're kind of like microchips for your dog or your cat, they go in the hind flippers
of the sea turtles, and then we actually etch the carapace.
So, the carapace of the sea turtles the top shell.
The top layer is made out of keratin, which is the same thing as our fingernails.
We are able to kind of track the sea turtle.
You know, make sure its behavior is the same as from before it came in to rehab.
See its overall health and kind of what it does after it leaves.
So, the turtle that we're releasing came in with a suspected vessel strike and it's an
unknown vessel at this point however the wounds on top of the carapace or the top shell are
pretty superficial.
So, we are going to tag this turtle and get it released back into the ocean.
McKenzie Mungai / Sea Turtle Conservation Technician
I think that when we do a sea turtle release, in general, no matter if it was a long-term
rehabilitation patient or patient that came in same day, and was clear for immediate release,
and we were able to get it back out, I don't think the feeling changes.
I just think that you know, when a turtle comes in, and you know that you and your team
are able to rehabilitate that turtle and get it
back out into the population, it's a feeling you really can't describe.
(instrumental music)
Chanel Browne / Sea Turtle Program Coordinator To this date, we have not had a sea turtle
rehabilitated and not been able to be back out into the wild.
So, that's something that we're pretty proud about.
And it honestly makes us as staff members feel like we're doing the right thing and
we're doing our jobs correctly to be able to have this wild animal treated and back
out into the water.
McKenzie Mungai / Sea Turtle Conservation Technician
We are the only sea turtle rehabilitation facility in the entire Hawaiian Islands at
the moment.
So, we do see sea turtles from surrounding islands.
So, we do a lot of work here and sometimes we are very busy.
But we would never turn down a turtle, we would always make space for a turtle.
Morgan Gardner / Sea Turtle Technician We get far more turtles from Maui than we
do from the other islands just because this is where we're located.
But I'm sure there's just as many turtles that need our help on those other islands
as well that just aren't getting seen to, because there's not a program in place for
it.
Chanel Browne / Sea Turtle Program Coordinator We are a small facility at the moment.
However, we do have plans within the next three to five years, hopefully to open our
own facility where we can have different types of care on different levels.
So, care for our sea turtles on the bottom, corals, we also want a level for education
because to me, as someone who grew up here, I didn't feel like I had very many opportunities
to branch out into marine biology.
So, it is very important to me to be able to have an educational space, a classroom
for kids to actually come and enjoy and see what we do, because it is really fun.
We also want to have a space for meetings and conferences and a place that we can actually
meet with other scientists, and do more research.
So, on top of doing rescue and rehab, we also have a really large
research component to what we do.
And that's just to build our knowledge on the honu here in Hawaiʻi.
McKenzie Mungai / Sea Turtle Conservation Technician
When you work with a small team, it's very important that you all really like each other,
and that you love coming to work and love what you do.
Because the people that you work with can make or break your job.
And I'm very lucky to be surrounded by such a wonderful team.
And I'm very lucky that we all love what we're doing as well, because passion is infectious.
Morgan Gardner / Sea Turtle Technician We also all started as either interns or volunteers
so we all voluntarily chose to be here before we even this became our job.
Chanel Browne / Sea Turtle Program Coordinator Honestly, it feels great to do what I do.
All aspects of the job getting in the water every day, I'm so grateful to say that I'm
able to go to the beach and work.
I'm also grateful for my team, I have an amazing team.
They are really the ones who, you know, keep my passion alive.
And being able to work with students here on island is also super important to me.
Sometimes it feels like pulling teeth to get kids to come back home, you know?
And I remember being in high school and me and my friends were like, oh my god, I'm so
ready to get off this rock, you know, and being away, you look back at our tiny home
and you realize how much help it needs and how much you can give to make it a better
place for others.
Sometimes it's kind of is looked at as like a failure to come home.
And I don't see it like that at all.
I look up to anybody that decides to come home after receiving an education and wanting
to make their home a better place.
So that's kind of what I'm trying to do.
(instrumental music)