The Valentine's Day winter storm created a condition that makes the turtles weak and inactive. Many of them died, but helpers are being praised for how many survived.

Transcript

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

February's cold snap shocked sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico into dangerous lethargy. Many more of them would have died if not for the Texas volunteers who saved them. That cold-stunning event is now considered the largest of its kind in recorded history. NPR's John Burnett visited the recuperating reptiles and some of their saviors for this follow-up.

JOHN BURNETT, BYLINE: As the historic winter storm settled over Texas, Henry Rodriguez and his volunteers headed out into the choppy waters of the Laguna Madre.

HENRY RODRIGUEZ: To start off, it was really choppy, bad weather - high swells, high winds. After noticing the first turtle, we noticed a whole bunch of other turtles just popping up. And the small ones were getting affected first.

BURNETT: Rodriguez is a sport fishing guide in South Padre Island. He considers sea turtles his friends. So when the weather turned bitterly cold, he knew what was about to happen. Volunteer Mark Grant joined him on that first sortie.

MARK GRANT: The adrenaline kicked in, and we picked up a whole ton of turtles and loaded this boat up two times to where we could barely walk on the deck. That's how many turtles we pulled out each time we went out.

BURNETT: Sea turtles are cold-blooded creatures. They depend on water temperature to regulate their body temperature. When the water falls below 50 degrees, they become catatonic. They can't swim and eventually float to the surface. In turtle talk, this is a cold-stunning event. They happen every year to sea turtles, which are an endangered species, from the coasts of Massachusetts to Florida to Texas. But most cold snaps only affect a few hundred animals. The week of February 14 was so astonishing, it's memorialized on a T-shirt.

WENDY KNIGHT: And what the shirt says is, I survived the great cold stun, February 2021, Sea Turtle Inc.

BURNETT: Wendy Knight is director of Sea Turtle Inc. on South Padre, a Bohemian barrier island at the tip of Texas popular with fishermen and vacationers. Until now, Florida held the record. Nearly 5,000 turtles were cold-stunned in 2010. Texas annihilated that record. Last month, more than 12,000 cold-stunned turtles were recorded on the lower Texas coast, and nearly half of those were rescued by Sea Turtle Inc. and an army of volunteers.

KNIGHT: And what ended up happening is really just word of mouth. We started having hundreds of people on boats out in water, on beaches, at the convention center and here at Sea Turtle Inc.

BURNETT: Volunteers brought in so many lethargic turtles they had to open the South Padre Island Convention Center. Soon, its floors were covered with turtles in blue plastic kiddie pools, in hastily built wooden corrals and laid out on black plastic in rows, flipper to flipper. The convention center had lost power, like most of the rest of Texas, so it was unheated. But the turtles warmed up and woke up anyway.

AMY BONKA: As the turtles start to warm up, they decide they want to get out of those nice rows. And so they start moving around. Another great thing that turtles do when they start to wake back up is they poop a lot.

BURNETT: Amy Bonka is chief conservation officer at Sea Turtle Inc.

BONKA: And so now they're moving around, and now they're messing that around. And so as you can imagine, it makes a very big mess.

BURNETT: I'm interviewing her in the rescue organization's hospital. This is where sea turtles recover when they're victims of fishhook infections, boat strikes or cold stuns, like the animal lolling about in the tank in front of us. Again, Wendy Knight.

KNIGHT: The one you're looking at right here is Dragon. Dragon came to us as part of the cold-stun event. So he had some infection and a problem with his flipper as well, so just was not quite ready to release with the rest of the troop.

BURNETT: Volunteers have already released more than 4,000 healthy, revived turtles. This audio is from a video shot during a release organized by the University of Texas Marine Science Institute farther up the coast. Rescuers celebrate as the leathery reptiles slide down a chute into the Gulf and paddle away furiously.

(SOUNDBITE OF WATER SPLASHING, CHEERING, APPLAUSE)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: That's kind of awesome.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: That was cool, man.

BURNETT: Not all the cold-stunned turtles survived, not by a long shot. Of more than 12,000 affected, only 35% of them lived, according to preliminary data. Barbara Schroeder is the national sea turtle coordinator with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

BARBARA SCHROEDER: It definitely is a blow. But I think we should look at it not in how many turtles died, but how many turtles were rescued. Communities came together. Thousands and thousands were rescued and survived.

BURNETT: Despite this big die-off, the future is not dire. Green sea turtles had been rebounding robustly because of aggressive conservation campaigns. And so many turtles were saved during the Valentine's week winter storm that scientists expect the population to recover. John Burnett, NPR News, South Padre Island, Texas. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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