This is Doctor Neil Burnie.
He lives in Bermuda, a stunning Atlantic Island six hundred and forty miles east of North
Carolina, USA.He’s spent the last thirty years practicing veterinary medicine, but
now he's transferring his veterinary skills to help save, protect, and learn more about
the incredible marine life of Bermuda’s Ocean.
This is a completely wild shark.
Alongside his dedicated Ocean Vet team, are a number of scientists,
Yeah, this and probably.
marine biologists, Just cut a little nick off the back fin.
and specialist master divers, helping to perform a number of unique and dangerous procedures,
in a bid to safeguard critically important marine species.Together, the team will be
fitting satellite tags to huge tiger sharks, saving precious green turtles, dissecting
giant blue marlin, and obtaining unique toxin samples from forty five tonne, migrating,
humpback whales.
Yay!
Woo hoo!My knees are like jell-o.
Yes, man!
This is Bermuda!
Home to Doctor Neil Burnie, the Ocean Vet.
The green sea turtle is one of the most recognised and loved reptiles in all of the world’s
oceans.
Like many marine species, these turtles are under threat.
Poachers, pollution, and fishing nets are all factors that have placed this animal on
the endangered species list.
Annie, hi!
Peter!
Jennifer!
Great to see you!
In this episode, Neil and the Ocean Vet crew will be working alongside the Bermuda Turtle
Project, performing a number of unique procedures to monitor the health and population dynamics
of Bermuda’s juvenile green sea turtles.
It’s right there!
Neil will also be working with the Bermuda Aquarium’s Turtle Stranding Unit, to recover,
rehabilitate, and re-release injured turtles back into the wild.
Finally, Neil, and Choy will attach a satellite tracking tag to a larger, more mature green
turtle in a bid to gather unique data which is vital to support the ongoing conservation
and protection of this internationally loved species.
Neil, and his Ocean Vet team have been invited to assist the Bermuda Turtle Project, by project
leader, Jennifer Grey, a lady who has dedicated most of her life to the study and conservation
of green sea turtles.
Close off the circle, so.
She is supported by Doctors; Peter, and Anne Meylan, the project scientific directors and
veterans of the Bermuda Turtle Project.
Peter!
Hey!
Great to see ya.
Annie!
Great to see you again!
Excellent!
It’s been a while.
Jennifer!
Hey, Neil!
What are we going to be doing today?
Catching lots of turtles, Neil.
You guys ready?
Can’t wait.
Excellent!
So who are all the participants here?
Can we have a list of names quickly?
Who’s who?
Start from here.
I’m Alice.
This international mix of participants will assist with the capture of the turtles.
This process is quite straightforward, a large deep net is used to encircle an area of seagrass
beds inhabited by the turtles.
As the turtles try to escape they swim into the soft netting.
So, these are all our course participants.
And it’s our job to get the turtles to the surface as soon as they enter the net.
We’re gonna then bring them back to Endurance and work them up, and hopefully one of them
will be big enough that we’ll be able to put a satellite tag on it.
Satellite tag data, along with DNA and blood research, is enabling this project to build
a visual web of migratory paths, populations, and breeding sites, helping to improve the
world wide conservation of this beautiful reptile.
So we’ve got the turtle that swam into the net, brought it to the surface.
Leanna, is disentangling it from the net, and I am giving a hand signal to the boat
so that they know we have one to be picked up.
Choy Aming, Neil’s right hand man and series marine biologist, is on the capture boat with
Jennifer Grey collecting the retrieved turtles.
Ok, so, Neil is dead ahead and he’s got another turtle, and there’s also about four
or five others that some of the other participants have.
So, turtles everywhere!
We’ve gotta get this guy in the boat as quick as possible!
I’m not, i’m not sure how many times we see this.
I think it’s only Ocean Vet where one has wrapped around the other one.
So this is definitely, er, a boat disentanglement here.
Yes, ok.
So for every one of these guys, there should be ninety nine more in the ocean.
And we’ve taken them out, so we’ve gotta do everything we can to preserve all these
green turtles, because this is the last of them.
Retrieving these turtles is no easy task, constantly untangling them, then holding them
at the surface is challenging.
These reptiles can weigh in excess of twenty kilos.
So it requires quite a bit of teamwork to get these bigger turtles out of the net.
But, Choy, if you can grab it.
Yeah.
This, actually, may be a candidate for our satellite tag, it’s quite a large turtle.
So far we’ve been out all of about ten or fifteen minutes, and we’ve got nine turtles
in the boat, and we’ve still got a few more to grab.
We’ve seen a few swimming around, darting in the, er, sand, so good hold thus far.
And we’re probably only about half way through.
Even the smaller turtles can present a challenge.
Having the capture boat close by, ensures the welfare and safety of every turtle.
Alright.
Great, guys!
This guy’s a little too entangled for me, so i’m going to pass him up to you guys.
Ok.
Luckily he’s small enough.
So, that little turtle was a little too badly entangled for me to get him out whilst he’s
in the water.
So we simply bring him onto the capture boat, and Choy and Cameron are gonna disentangle
him.
I’m just gonna wet down the rest of our turtles, keep them nicely cool, while they’re
waiting in the capture boat to get back to the Endurance.
Alright.
This is our smallest guy yet, isn’t he cute?
So we’re just gonna stick him in the back, and, er, beautiful, small specimen.
Fantastic.Ok.
There you go, you got it?
Good, man.
Green sea turtles are air breathers, so being out of the water is not harmful to them.
By cushioning the turtles on these foam noodles, Neil and the team ensure they remain calm
and secure during the tagging and sampling procedures.
So every turtle that comes on board gets scanned with this micro chip scanner.
This is exactly the same one that I use at my vet practice, and Michaela has seen these
at Endsmeet, cos we use these on the dogs and cats.
So, we’re gonna scan this animal, and we’re gonna scan this left flipper.
And we’re gonna see if there’s a tag in it.
And this one doesn’t have one.
And we’re gonna keep moving around the group.
We’re gonna come to this one.
Uh!
Here we go!
We can now go and find the details of when this animal was chipped previously, what it’s
history was, and what it’s tag number was that it shared, because it’s obviously lost
the external tag that was applied at the same time as the PIT tag.
So, fourteen August, 2007, she was marked.
14th August, 2007, almost seven years ago, and she’s back here.
And I say ‘she,’ with impunity, right?
Because she’s been sexed?
Well, I have to, I have to look at the database to tell you for sure.
Oh, Ok.
Alright.
Some of the turtles don’t have the micro chips installed, so after fitting some new
external fin tags, Neil and Peter implant new micro chips.
So we’ve got a perfect ID number that’s unique to this animal, means researchers can
find this, fishermen will be able to identify this creature by simply reading this tag.
You seeing these here, Jen?
Do these look like heel bite marks to you?
Yeah, they look like bite marks.
They do, don’t they?
Yep, Neil!
Neil, around?
Choy and Jennifer spot signs of injury to one of the turtle’s flippers, so Neil comes
in to assess the animal.
And, look!
I think there’s one more on the front as well, man.
So if we compare this rear flipper to the one on the turtle next to him, you can see
there’s two quite clear semi circular indentations where pieces of tissue have been removed and
have then healed over.
And the same on his back flipper here, two discreet bite marks, and then something from
the front also.
It’s common for these turtles to sustain injuries as they grow up in the waters around
Bermuda.
Predators, such as galapagos sharks and even much larger tiger sharks are known to feed
on these turtles.
Anyway, he seems to be none the worse for it.
And, it’s obviously, he’s able to swim fine.
It’s just a little bit of an interesting, er, disfigurement.
These turtles can weigh up to one hundred and eighty kilos, or four hundred pounds when
mature.
Weighing them is an important part of monitoring their health.
Ok, so we’ve just strapped in our turtle.
You can see we’ve got a rope on each fin.
We’ve just put him into the scale.
You can see he hangs quite nicely.
He seems reasonably relaxed.
We’re just waiting for the scale to get a reading on his exact weight.
So this guy’s about twenty one point six kilograms, yeah.
So, that’s a good sized animal.
They’re solid little guys.
Next, Neil needs to take some blood.
So we’re just preparing this turtle to have blood samples drawn for DNA analysis and for
sexing purposes.There it is.
There’s your blood.
Is that sufficient?
A little more, just a little more.
There’s all our DNA that we need.
Plenty.Put that blue lid on there.
Oops.
These DNA samples will be compared with that of other international green sea turtle populations.
If there’s a match, then the turtle project can determine what region that specific juvenile
little green turtle has come from to reach Bermuda.
A lot of blood to spin today.
Sure, sure.
Now that the blood samples have been taken, Choy, Robert, and some of the other participants
are processing them in the on board lab.
Now, you can see there’s a slight colour variance as I pull these out.
Er, these more yellowish tinged serums here, they’re from older turtles and the thinking
is it’s a pigment from all the seagrass that they’re eating, so that’s kind of
neat.
So the younger turtles have a clear serum, and the older turtles have, er, sort of a
yellowish serum to them.
Ok.
Oh, that’s a much more clear sample.
So if you look at these two you can see that one is a lot lighter, that’s probably from
a younger turtle, and that yellowish stuff, those are the pigments from the seagrass that
we were speaking about.
Once the blood sampling is complete and the serum is extracted, Neil is ready to release
these turtles back into the wild.
So we’ve had a great day here at Somerset Long Bay.
We’ve got a whole lot of turtles that we’ve worked up and we’re getting ready to release
them.
We’ve kept one back, cos we’re gonna put that satellite tag on that one creature.
It’s been a wonderful project!
Oh, it’s been a great day!
Over the last forty years this study’s been going on.
And it’s providing data that not only protects these turtles here in Bermuda, but throughout
their Caribbean range.
Right.
So i’m going to get into the water and, er, we’re gonna get these guys released
and let them swim away.
The research that’s been conducted today will make a huge difference in the fight to
preserve green sea turtle populations, not just in Bermuda, but all over the world.
That was the last one.
They’re all gone.
Yeah.
Good work.
That’s great, Choy.
It was really good.
All the turtles got released.
We collected a whole bunch of data.
It was a fantastic day all round.
Great success for Ocean Vet, and the Bermuda Turtle Project.
So great job, guys!
Awesome!There we go.
Little baby.
It's like a nursery.
The turtle project is not alone in it’s battle to save this species.
Neil is assisting another project which helps ensure the survival of Bermuda’s green sea
turtles.
This is the turtle exhibit at the Bermuda Aquarium Museum and Zoo.
And these two girls were actually hatched here on the sand beach you can see behind
me.
There is also a wildlife rehabilitation centre here at the Aquarium, where injured or sick
turtles are brought for their recovery.
The Bermuda Turtle Project works hard to ensure the health of green turtles in Bermuda, but
sadly some are injured by the ingestion of plastic, ingestion of other toxins, or even
being injured by boats.
They’re brought here, and when they’re recovered they’re released back into the
wild.
So it’s somewhere on this beach.
Oh yeah, there it is!
It’s right there.
Neil is working with Patrick from the Turtle Stranding Network.
Yeah, they said it was under the mangroves.
They’re responding to a call reporting a turtle that’s been washed up on Gibbet’s
Beach, not far from the Aquarium.
Cool.
What’s that?
So.
A little green, right?
Yep.
A little green.
Wow.
Alright, let me go get the tub, alright?
Looks a little.
Yeah.
Sure, man.
Alright Patrick, you go and get the tub and we’ll get this guy back to the Aquarium.
Alright, cool.
I’ll be right back.
Alright, let me just see.So the first thing we’re going to do is assess for any type
of external injuries on this animal, see if he’s been hit by a boat, if he’s got any
prop damage.
I’m gonna just take him into the ocean.
I’m gonna carry him.
I’m going to rinse him off.
This is one of, er, many thousands of immature green turtles who spend their time here as
they’re growing up.
And on my first exam, the great news is his carapace has not been injured.
We quite commonly see prop cuts all the way through the shell, right the way through into
the internal organs.
This animal is not damaged.
And, again, so we look at his ventral surface, we look at his plastron, and his plastron
is also in tact.
‘Hi, baby!’
He actually looks in pretty good shape.
The only thing I would say is he’s pretty quiet for a little green turtle, normally
they’d be fighting me and trying to get away.
He’s maybe, he’s maybe a little excessively buoyant.
Yeah, he’s floating a little too high.
He should be able to be neutral, to be able to pull himself down and sit on the bottom,
and this guy’s floating with a large part of his back out of the water.
So he may have an accumulation of gas in his abdomen.
He may have eaten something that’s blocking his intestines and so the gas is not escaping.So
we’re gonna get him over to the Aquarium and we’ll get Doctor Ian Walker, who’s
the curator there, we’ll get him to do a full and thorough examination of this turtle
and we’ll see if we can help him out.
So, yeah, if we like get him up on this table once we’re gloved, I can do that.
Doctor Ian Walker is chief curator at the Aquarium Museum and Zoo and has years of experience
working with a myriad of different species, including turtles.
Alright.
Roma, if you could just hit that light for me.
After a routine physical examination and X-Ray, he has a suspicion of what the problem with
this turtle might be.
What we have right here is the trachea coming down and then breaking in the two, er, two
primary bronchi.
Just like you, or I?
Exactly, exactly.
Erm, now interestingly enough their lungs aren’t sitting in, er, sort of, in the thorax,
they don’t have a diaphragm, so it’s just sitting there in their coelomic cavity.
Um, and consequently if they get over inflated, they float.
But this is actually a normal reaction for sea turtles, in the wild.
So a sea turtle in the wild, when it’s in trouble, will over inflate it’s lungs as
a way of bringing it to the surface so that it can rest at the surface.
That way it doesn’t have to expend effort every time it comes to the surface to breath,
because remember these are obligate air breathers, they have to be up there.
Yeah, we’ve seen turtles like this before and our current theory is that they’ve probably
ingested too much, er, jellyfish.
Er, so some of the pneumatosis, well they’re getting a lot of pneumatosis, these are the
stinging cells.
Right.
from the jellyfish, are in their intestines constantly stinging them and constantly delivering
venom into their system.…A little bit.
So we’ll see.
We’re gonna just slide that in gently.
So we’re sliding it in to the cloaca.
Doctor Walker decides to perform an enema on the turtle to see if he can gather a sample
of the stinging cells.
Wow!
So this is a pneumatosis.
This is what you’re expecting to see?
Yep, this exactly.
Based on the clinical signs of the animal, this is exactly what we thought we might see
in this fecal.
So it’s proven this animal’s eaten, probably, a jellyfish, er, and presumably there’s
a lot more of these in the intestine.
These pneumatosis, when we look at them like this, we can see everything’s coiled up
inside them.
It’s really like a jack in a box where the head of the jack in the box is jammed inside
the spring, and as the spring comes out everything turns inside out like this, and then right
at the end of it there’s a stinging needle with a bunch of venom in it.
So if these things unload inside the turtle, they poison the turtle from the inside.
Hopefully, this little turtle, after a few days under the care of Patrick, Rhoma, and
Ian, is gonna recover and hopefully we’ll get a chance to release it back into the wild.
This little turtle will remain at the Bermuda Aquarium Museum and Zoo until it’s fully
recovered.
Neil will return later to release it back into the wild.
Next up, Neil and Choy are back working with the Bermuda Turtle Project to fit a satellite
tag to the shell of one of the larger green turtles they collected earlier.
So the value of this type of tag is immense.
Not only will it tell us the day to day, hour to hour movements of this turtle on and off
his feeding site to his resting sites, when he may be at risk crossing major boat channels,
but also if this turtle does go on his long-term migration then we may be able to see what
route this turtle uses to return towards the nesting site where he originated.
The conservation of these turtles is truly an international venture, and that’s what
the Bermuda Turtle Project is all about.
Ok.
So this is the satellite tag, and it’s the exact same company and exact same technology
that we use on our tiger sharks.
It’s just a different model so it can attach to a turtle shell, just like that.
And this antenna, here, what it will do is every time the turtle surfaces it will relay
data to a satellite and we will get real time movements on where this turtle is.
So we will be able to track him almost as if he had a cellphone.
Ok.
Looking good, I think.
Yeah.
So we’re almost ready to apply the tag.So, Robert, I think we’ll let you do the honours
for this.
Yeah, and, er, here I think you wanna make a little ridge on the front, so i’ll just
keep the chopstick at the ready.
Alright.
Just give it a nice squeeze down.
Get it good in-seeded in the epoxy.
So we’re making sure we have a nice, smooth attachment between the shell and the tag.
With the tag firmly bonded to the turtle’s shell it’s time for Neil and the team to
release this beautiful animal back into the ocean.
So after an epic day here tagging and recording data from turtles we’re now gonna let this
girl go.
We’ve named her, Kirsty.
And we’re gonna hope that this animal will actually leave Bermuda and go on it’s developmental
migratory path, and we can follow this animal to some destination in the Caribbean.
Who knows where.
I’m gonna get in the water and make sure she swims away strongly.
So I take it you’re gonna try and hold her upright, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just make sure she’s comfortable in the water, takes a few breaths.
Ok.
Just take the weight on the back for a sec, until, there!
Perfect.
Nice.
Alright, good grip?
So i’m just gonna wait for her to take a good breath and then i’m gonna let her go.
The release of this turtle marks the beginning of a research project which will have far
wider reaching ramifications than the distance this turtle will travel in it’s lifetime.
And it will help ensure the continued research and conservation of it’s entire species.
Wow!
So, she took off like a rocket!
As soon as I let her go, gone!
Out of sight, right?
Wicked!
Ha ha.
By working with these animals, Neil and his team have helped to ensure that green sea
turtles are protected not just in Bermuda, but all over the world.
These animals have a critical role in the ocean’s marine ecosystem.
By gathering samples and tagging these turtles, Neil and his team have ensured the continued
fight for this animal’s survival.
Back at the Aquarium, Neil and Choy have received good news about the sick turtle rescued earlier.
So this is the little turtle that we brought into wildlife rehab a few days ago, and he’s
fully recovered from the ingestion of those poisonous jellyfish stinging cells.
It’s time for Choy, Patrick, and I to return him to the ocean.
The turtle is being loaded onto the Ocean Vet boat, Bones.
From here, Neil, Choy, and Patrick will transfer the turtle to it’s release site.
Neil and the team have selected a location that is rich with seagrass beds, the perfect
habitat for this juvenile, little green sea turtle to thrive.
Thanks, Patrick.
Your welcome.
The Bermuda Turtle Project, the stranding network, and the conservation projects that
support the research and protection of these marine turtles around the world, make a profound
difference.
But there’s still so much more that can be done.
We wish this guy all the best.
He has a tough road ahead as he continues on his epic journey.
Good luck, little one!
This little green sea turtle is once again free to roam the seagrass beds of Bermuda.
It’s thanks to the continued efforts from all the individuals featured in this programme
that the battle to get these turtles off the endangered species list may eventually be
won.
Next time on Ocean Vet, Neil and his team are on a rescue mission to save a prehistoric
shark.
They’ll have to utilise all of their skills and expertise if they are to save this animal
and ensure it returns safely back into the deep.
