Turtle Hospital

Monday March 18th Keith and I went to visit the Turtle Hospital in Marathon.  This facility is fully equipped to rescue, rehabilitate, and release injured and/or sick sea turtles.

Turtle Hospital

The hospital started out as the Hidden Harbor Hotel.  In 1980 Richie Moretti purchased the property. He ran it as a hotel until 2005 when he turned it into a place for the rescue and rehabilitation of sea turtles.  It grew into into a turtle hospital with the old guest rooms serving as rooms for staff and offices, surgical,treatment, and radiology rooms.  The old salt water swimming pool was converted to house some of the turtles and many additional tanks of varying sizes have also been added around the property to accommodate all sizes and ages of turtles that may come through the facility.  Moretti deeded the property to the non-profit turtle hospital that now runs the facility with the provision that it will remain a place for turtle care and education.

View out over the old hotel swimming pool with additional tanks

There are some small turtles

Hatchling

And some large turtles

There are 7 species of sea turtles in the world and 5 of them can be found here in the Florida Keys.  They are the loggerhead, Kemp's Ridley, green sea turtle, hawks bill, and leatherback.  These turtles can suffer injuries due to boat strikes or being entangled in fishing nets.  They can also develop intestinal impactions from ingesting garbage.  Another ailment of many turtles is fibropapillomas.  These are cauliflower like tumors that are caused by a virus and can form on the turtles flipper, head and face, or even internally.  These can become life threatening and need to be removed to save the turtle.  The hospital is able to help with all these afflictions.

This turtle has a strip of Velcro you can see pasted to his shell.  They will Velcro weights onto the strip to help him submerge since he has trouble regulating his buoyancy after being hit by a boat.

This turtle has multiple fibropapilloma tumors on his flippers that will be removed surgically and then he can be released

As you can see in the picture, they write the names of the turtles on their shells so they can identify them easier for daily treatment.

It was an interesting excursion and one we wanted to do before we left the area.  With only about a week left here in Marathon, our time is running out quickly.  Wednesday we are moving Southern Style just a mile north to Marlin Bay Marina for a few days.  Our good friend Brad Hanks will be arriving to visit and watch the NCAA basketball tournament with Captain Keith.  We are excited to have Brad visit and spend a few days in a different marina before leaving Marathon.