And I'm Madeline Walden and this is Aquarium of the Podcific a podcast brought to you by Aquarium of the Pacific Southern California's largest aquarium.
Join us as we learn alongside the experts in animal care, conservation and more. Welcome back to Aquarium of the Podcific. Today we're going to learn all about sea turtles.
Yes, sea turtles that we monitor here Long Beach and our residency turtles here at the Aquarium.
We're going to hear from Cassandra Davis, the Aquarium's Volunteer Services Manager who also oversees our Sea Turtle Monitoring Project. And we get to hear from Adam Atlas, our tropical reef aquarist who oversees the largest exhibit we have at the Aquarium and the sea turtles that call it home. Now, Madeline we have three turtles here at the Aquarium. Do you know them all by name? And what kind are they?
I do know them by name. We have Lou and Theo who are olive ridley sea turtles. And then we have Copper who's a green sea turtle.
Well, I learned a fun fact today that sea turtles fat is green, because they eat so much grass that their fat turns green. And last week, we learned that sea otters teeth and bones turn purple because they eat so many purple sea urchins that their bones turned purple. So my question for you is, what color are your insides based off of what you eat the most of I think
I think they'd be green too, because I drink a lot of matcha. And I know you do, too. We share that love.
So just like,
just like, green sea turtles, your podcast hosts are also green on the inside.
We should ask each of our guests what color their insides are based off of what they eat the most of. So with that being said, let's get into today's interview.
Okay, welcome. Cassandra, thank you so much for joining us today. Hello, hello.
Hello. Thanks for having me.
Can you tell us a little bit about your job here at the Aquarium? What's your job title? What do you do? How long have you been here?
Sure. I'll start with how long you've been here because that's kind of a fun starting point. I started as a volunteer in 2011. And I was hired to be full time in 2015, early 2015. That kind of started my journey to being a full time paid staff member the aquarium and I have been working particularly with volunteers ever since.
What where you volunteering in when you first started?
I volunteered in a lot of different department. Everything all all of the above. I started off as an education volunteer. I also was doing late night events. And I became a Day Captain leading the education volunteer teams. I dipped my toes into marketing and working with the marketing team as a volunteer. I did special events, which is just a whole lot of fun getting to know the different cultures and local people in Long Beach. It's just a really wonderful time I just moved to Long Beach, and was just getting to know the area and the aquarium was a perfect place to take a deep dive and literally, literally take a deep dive and plunge in I had also just become certified in scuba diving and I got to meet a lot of amazing people that way. That's awesome. Well,
I think one of my favorite things about the aquariums volunteer program is how comprehensive it is. And you can volunteer in basically any department and kind of get a view of what that looks like if that's a career course that you're interested in. And it's really cool to see people from all walks of life being a part of our volunteer program, and we are so volunteer base that we have so much value on them. So I think everything you do is super valuable to us.
It's just super fun. We get to, like you said work with people of all walks of life. And we get to really get engaged with the community and connect people to service everybody should be able to have honestly the rewards that you get from volunteering and being part of a community because there's so much to learn and so much to get back from that. You know, we our volunteers, we have them give a lot to us, and they get a lot back out of it. And it's really neat.
We couldn't do what we do without our volunteers are such an amazing group of people. But today it's so seamless What do you mean? We can talk about volunteers forever. But I would love to talk about something that you do separately from our, well, I guess it's related technically, is our sea turtle Monitoring Program, which is a citizen science based project. Right?
Yeah. Speaking of volunteering, that was one of the first things I really became involved in at the aquarium. I got to know a lot of people while I was an education volunteer and one of them said, Hey, why don't you come to this meeting we're having about sea turtles and Long Beach and I said okay, and I had no idea I was committing to 10 years of gathering data. And it's been really amazing. So, yeah, one of one of my other volunteer roles when I first started out was as a citizen scientist or community scientist, working with the Sea Turtle Monitoring Project and working with the Los Cerritos Wetlands, to see what this might look like as we move forward with it.
So cool. What is citizen science? What's community science? How would you define that?
Really, it is all science, the roots of science are based in inquiry and pursuing a question of finding answers that lead to more questions. And what's really neat is that there's been a bit of a revival in this idea of community science, this idea that everybody can participate, it's not something that's up on a high shelf in a tower somewhere. Science is more than mixing chemicals and beakers. It is that too, which is always fun. But science is everything around us. And community science means that anybody can get involved. We are pretty intentional with using the word community because you don't have to have citizenship to be a scientist, you can participate in gathering data gathering information. Some of the big things we know in science, are gathered by people who continue to go and make observations in order to answer big questions. And so community science is really tapping into the community and saying, Hey, we have a big question. We don't have any way of answering without 10s or hundreds or 1000s or more people giving us information telling us what they see what they observe. And recording that and gathering this information over sometimes long periods of time.
And so one of these efforts have been the Sea Turtle Monitoring Project, which I think people would be very surprised to hear that we have sea turtles here in Long Beach, and where they are locally. I'll let you answer that
it's really neat that we are in Long Beach, we're in Southern California. Right outside our doors is this incredible urban landscape. And sea turtles are part of it. The sea turtles that we have here in Long Beach at the border of like Long Beach and Seal Beach. They are year round residents. They are green sea turtles. And they are in this portion of the San Gabriel River, the one of the two big rivers that exits into Long Beach itself. They are thriving. They're doing great, so cool. And you see them in this channel of the river and we're going to say river a lot we're going to say San Gabriel River a lot. But in all honesty, it's not necessarily the freshwater portion of the river. It is a channel that is taking the place of what used to be a wetlands habitat of salt marsh habitat. And this channel is where you have the freshwater mixing in with the saltwater and timeslot like this year where we had a lot of rain, there might be a lot more freshwater, but most of the time it is primarily saltwater habitat. And where we see the sea turtles is an area of the river that is influenced by the tide and influenced by all the things you would normally think of if you're thinking of a beach kind of area without the sand. Very, not too much sand.
I've been lucky enough to go to a sea turtle monitoring day. And it's just it's so exciting. Every time you see one pop up. It's like Oh, it's right there.
Yeah, cool. It doesn't get old. 10 years. I'm still like, we just saw sea turtle y'all. Yeah, it's really exciting. And it's one of the few places where you can go even going down the coast. It's one of the few places you can go where you can regularly see sea turtles coming up.
Very cool. What species do you typically see when you're out monitoring.
We primarily see the green sea turtle. We know that year round, there are green sea turtles present in the area. And we also know from sightings offshore, and from some of the rescue work we've done at the aquarium that there are other species of sea turtles here in Southern California passing by passing through, but it is the green sea turtle that is here year round and kind of making its home here.
Very cool. Now in that space, I feel like there's could be a number of risks that they can face in that area. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Sure. It is an urban environment. It's really wild to see these green sea turtles popping up for a breath of air. And they are surrounded by PCH. They are sort of, you know, Pacific Coast Highway. They're surrounded by the berms of the river, the levees, which are these big rocky levees that we have. There's a bike path that goes down the river. There's power plants, there's fast cars, there's all of the things you think of when you're thinking of our urban environment. And so they are here in that setting. The river itself doesn't necessarily have too many I kind of manmade hazards for them. But it does have a couple of elements that they are living within and working around. One is near the mouth of the river or anytime you're on a coastal area, there are a kind of boats going around. And so boats have certain areas where you have speed limits and five miles an hour. And that's to help protect animals like sea turtles that might be right under the surface and might not be prepared for something that would be moving faster. So that could be one thing they could encounter. Another thing is debris. Whether it is discarded fishing line, getting entangled in some discarded fishing line or attempting to even swallow some discarded fishing hooks can happen to the sea turtles. It is something that is commonly seen when we do a rescue of a sea turtle that they have ingested some fishing line or or gotten tangled up in it. And sometimes we'll also see trash, debris from our houses and our neighborhoods flows in Southern California into the gutter which flows down into our rivers. There's not really any filtration between your curb and the ocean. There are some areas where we have berms or other things to help stop some of the trash. But it doesn't go through a system. It just goes into a underground river then goes out into a channel and goes out into the ocean. So the sea turtles are often swimming around where we see some of this debris or trash floating down the river. And that seems to affect them to some degree. I know. Yeah, there have been sea turtles found with with trash ingested. But honestly, the majority of the green sea turtles we see are swimming around living their lives and they're especially thriving in the area of the river that is near the Los Cerritos Wetlands. And so Los Cerritos Wetlands is this tiny pocket wetland. And it has one marsh that is really connected to the saltwater intake and that's Zedler Marsh named for Joyce Zedler, an amazing scientist who has done a lot for our wetlands, and she's still doing a lot for our wetlands, it's really wonderful to have that for her and to know her. And at this, you know, mouth of of settler Marsh, the sea turtles are absolutely thriving. They are active in this area, that's one of the big things we've observed. And they're coming up for air pretty frequently, which means they are probably doing something which makes them breathe a little harder, just like us when they're more active, they breathe harder. And so they're probably feeding and finding good food sources right there at the mouth of the wetlands. And over the years, I've been able to volunteer helping to restore those wetlands and work with some of the organizations that are helping to rebuild the Los Cerritos Wetlands, and we're seeing good effects from that sounds really neat to house and
Can tell us a little bit about what you're monitoring. What are you taking note of when you see the sea turtles? Are you tracking their behavior? Are you checking to see if they seemed injured? What are you doing out there?
It's a great question. We're tracking where they're surfacing for air. That is one of the primary objectives for the study we get to since we're able to bring in a number of different community scientists and they all gather together and then we spread out along the river at specific observation points. And we track how many times we see a sea turtle coming up for air that can tell us a bit about how much activity might be happening. It can give us more information about the usage of this habitat for the sea turtles. And it has led to discoveries like that concentration at the mouth of the wetlands. That was not quite what we were expecting when we started the study. We were really tracking their activity around warmer waters in the river has two power plants kind of attached to the river that use water to help cool the power plants. And they've been phasing out that once through cooling, and part of it was seeing well, what happens with the sea turtles? Do they change their behavior when that happens? And that was the original objective for the study. But we've learned so much more in the process.
That's amazing. How cool.
When you said you were doing surveys around the power plants and kind of identifying how that might impact sea turtle behavior, were you finding that they hang out in the warmer water or that they avoided a little bit more?
Oh, good question. So sea turtles are reptiles, they were originally they're kind of one of those animals that migrated out of the ocean evolved to be on land, and then they went back to the ocean. Whales are kind of the same way. So some of them were like, I saw what's up there, I'm gonna go back. And so sea turtles generally after they hatch, more than half of them never come out on land again, half that survived. And I the they only come back out on land to lay their eggs. But I they do their reptiles and they do like the warmth. So they're not like us, they can't generate their own heat. The green sea turtles though they do have some adaptations that help them survive in slightly colder waters. They have thick, blubber thick fat that is green, because they eat grass. They're basically lawn mowers of the ocean. And that is a direct quote from a scientist like a real genuine NOAA scientist. You can call them lawn mowers of the sea. So green sea turtles, they mostly eat sea grass, but they do, even though they have that thick blubber, they need to have a bit more warmth. So their lowest really habitable temperature is about 50/55 degrees somewhere in there, they need something a little bit warmer. And there are three sources of warm water in the river. Two of them are the power plants with the ones through cooling. And then one is the river itself. So the water coming down the San Gabriel channel, it was a free flowing river, it has become channelized. And it goes through miles of cement, before it hits the ocean water. And in that process, it heats up tremendously. If you ever have, you know, stepped in a puddle that was sitting, it's warm. And so they are they also have that. And they have a small pocket of warmer water from the wetlands as well. Wetlands tend to have shallower pools with dark green matter in them. And they gather warmth, and it's a little bit warmer at the mouth of the wetlands too.
I think that's a really interesting observation to see that the sea turtles are sort of choosing to use this warmer water from the powerplant. Because typically, when you think of human animal interactions, you typically think the anthropogenic the human activity is having a negative effect on these animals. But it's interesting to see that some of the things that we do, even if we might think, hey, this negatively impacts the environment, there may be some species that benefit from that or use that more. And this might be sort of a complicated question. But do you think that if the power plants stop using that water for cooling, we might see a detrimental effect on the population of sea turtles in that area? Or do you think they would find somewhere maybe else to go?
I certainly wouldn't call it a detrimental effect, I think we would see slightly different habits forming from the sea turtles, we see them up and down the river, not just in the area of the power plants. But that question is one of the main reasons we started this study was to see what would happen it was something that we did see happen in San Diego. And there were some ones through power plants that were turning off that cooling power in San Diego. And we did see the sea turtles kind of disperse from that concentrated area when that happened, doesn't mean that they necessarily went anywhere other than just not hanging out at the cool spot anymore, or the hot spot anymore. Yeah, they they stopped going to the spa, and they just went back home and hung out on the seagrass. So we still were able to continue tracking those and there's some projects down in San Diego that have really been able to track some of those sea turtles and track their habits around eel grass in particular. And what patch of eel grass do they like to mow? They have home patches of grass, they keep a nice trimmed front lawn. They are really, they've really established themselves. Those sea turtles in San Diego do tend to be larger, which can mean that they're older. In the river we don't tend to see super large green sea turtles green sea turtles are the biggest, hard shelled sea turtle in the world, they get big. And we have had a couple that we've seen that are very big. We even had one that was rescued, that was over 200 pounds. So it was big. Yeah. And we, so we have seen larger turtles. But the majority of the ones we see are much smaller. I mean, they are probably younger. And some of it is food availability. Like they grow bigger if they have more food, warmer waters, they don't grow as big if they don't have as good of conditions. But the ones that we see in the river tend to be younger, more juvenile. And they don't necessarily have those established like grassy patches that they've seen down in San Diego, at least not that we found yet.
So as a teenager, and a juvenile, they're hanging out in LA, doing cool stuff. Then as they get older, they settle down, they get their home grassy patch, and they mow their lawn and keep it nice, just like wow, I'm learning more about turtles every day.
That's amazing. So I have been lucky enough to come along to a couple of sea turtle rescues and releases that the aquarium has done. Is that something you are looking for when you're out monitoring, sea turtles in distress? What does that look like? And what should someone do if they see a sea turtle seemingly in distress?
That's a great question. I know that this will be available nationally. So I want to emphasize if you do see a sea turtle and you think it is in distress, please reach out to National Marine Fisheries Service, NOAA, there are national hotlines as well as local hotlines that you can reach out to, they will know how to take care of the sea turtle, they'll be able to connect you with local rescue organizations like the Aquarium of the Pacific, they will be able to assess the turtle, they will be able to determine the best way to even handle the turtle it's really important that you're not trying to handle a turtle yourself without some instruction. Now, if you are fishing and you you accidentally catch a turtle, there are some instructions. Sometimes in popular places. There's even signs up with instructions on what to do to help make sure the turtle has best chance of survival. Or you can call these hotlines and they'll walk you through step by step how to make sure that the turtle survives. But because sea turtles spines are attached to their shell, it's really important that they're handled in specific ways so that you don't accidentally cause harm to the turtle by handling it. So first and foremost, if you see a sea turtle in distress, please call the stranding hotline. And that will get you directly connected with somebody who can help walk you through the next steps or what you're going to do. We do have some unique situations here in Long Beach. Yes, we're always keeping an eye out. If a turtle looks like it's has a different breathing pattern, then we're going to call, and we call too, we call them and ask what we should do next. And and we're going to try to make sure that that turtle is okay. I will say as a huge caveat that has happened once in the 10 years that we've been doing this for a sea turtle that we've been rescuing it. And it happened many years ago now. But I think that influenced everybody. Fortunately, National Marine Fishery Service, NOAA was on site. They helped to get the turtle up on shore. It was maybe about two or three feet long. And we were able to disentangle it, they were able to assess it, take the measurements they needed, take pictures of its face for identification later, and then release it back into..
What a great day
Yeah, it was great. And it happened to be a day that NPR was reporting on. So it's just like, no worries.
Not a paid actor.
I was like this does not happen every day. We also had a lot of volunteers that I was training at the time. And I was like, This is not what a day. This sounds once in a lifetime experience. But it was it was pretty wild. It was a lot of fun. Out of that. The Aquarium realized, hey, we need to raise awareness about having this stranding hotline. And so the Aquarium sponsored some signs that are on the river at the different entrances to the bike path and that area that have the phone number right there on it. So that if you are on the San Gabriel River, you can, you can immediately find that number. It's also on our website under the Sea Turtle Monitoring Project information. So if you're ever like I can't remember what to do, it's just much easier to like look it up on your phone and find it pretty quickly.
We'll be sure to link it in the show notes too. So if you're interested, you can click on that and read a little bit more about that. But my last question before we get to questions from our social media is what are some of your favorite observations during your time doing the sea turtle monitoring? Do you have does any stand out? I mean, I know there's something
Aside from that one.
Just randomly rescuing and saving the life of a sea turtle. That was cool.
Aside from that
For sure.
I think that there just been some magical days where you go out there, and maybe you're not expecting too much. And you watch the water. And you're always prepared for zero observation, zero is a number, it's important data. But every once in a while, it's incredible. And there's just sea turtles popping up left and right. And you're like, Oh, yes, there's one. And I think that my favorite was one of the, gosh, 2015 or so one of the observation sessions, there was a turtle that just it felt like it was watching us as much as we were watching it, and it kept coming right up towards towards the edge and popping up and taking a breath and then going back around swimming around. It was it was just so much fun. It was really cool.
Little did you know he had a clipboard underwater.
How many people were watching him
How much you guys were breathing? What activity you're doing? Are they foraging? What are they up to?
I know, they've got all these theories
Anything, they have decades of data on us.
Absolutely. Probably more than that. I mean, you know, that area used to be wetlands, it used to be a key habitat for green turtles, it is likely that they have been there since before. Or I guess time immemorial is how you might say it long before we started recording them. Yeah, beyond that, I think some of my favorite observations are not sea turtles at all. Just the other things that you see I'm seeing out there all the time. We've seen dolphin swim up the river. We've watched paddleboarders paddle around. We've seen sea lions which by the way, I did try to paddleboard to that area once, not recommended. It is so hard to get there. So I there are other places you can go local to Long Beach that are so much better, much more enjoyable that it was not easy. We gave up about halfway. Yeah, and I Yeah, dolphins, sea lions all kinds of bird life. And I went we have on footage, some I juvenile sharks probably smooth hound sharks only like two feet. And this one time I saw a green sea turtle that the whole turtle could have fit on a piece of paper, an 8x11 sheet of paper, sheet of paper. It was so tiny that I was like that can't be a sea turtle. And it absolutely was. And that was really a lot of fun.
Very neat. Very cool. Okay, a couple of questions from social media. Shout out to Instagram, people who submitted their questions. Are sea turtles endangered? Are the sea turtle if you're monitoring endangered?
there are different species of sea turtles, and all of them are protected species. They are all going through different phases of recovery. And so they are protected from their eggs all the way through the grown turtles. And they're protected nationally, and in many cases internationally as well. The eastern Pacific green sea turtle, which is kind of weird to say, because we're on the west coast, but it's the east of the Pacific Ocean. The eastern Pacific green sea turtle is kind of a success story. And it's on its way to recovery, which is really exciting. That is in large part because of the work of nonprofits and government agencies, dating all the way back to the late 70s all the way through today in helping to protect nesting beaches in areas like Michocán, and helping to prevent large entanglements that might harm sea turtles, helping to have those species bounce back and come back. So they have moved from the endangered status. Their official status for eastern Pacific green turtles is now at the threatened status. So that's like the next step. It's moving on it still very protected, still in recovery, nowhere near the numbers they should be. But we're starting to see that success and it takes a long time. I mean, we've talked about those teenagers, those juveniles, they're actually probably in their 20s or so. It takes at least 25 sometimes up to 50 years before a green turtle is of the age where it would go back and reproduce. So they they they like really hang out at their parents house a long time. They enjoy their younger years
Learn from the turtles really enjoy that time.
How to sea turtles find their breeding grounds each year?
That is a great mystery.
Ooh, nobody knows.
Yeah. So they do go back to the same nesting beaches year after year. We know that from a lot of tracking studies, some that originally really did involve a kind of a community science. Some of the early sea turtle researchers in the 1950s and 60s, they developed tagging methods, so little metal tags that they would attach to sea turtle flippers. And they would get those mailed back to them. And they would offer a reward for mailing it back. And they would record where was this turtle seen? How far did it travel. And up until then, it was really thought that turtles since they were seen every year or every two years, that they probably had shorter lifespans, and they stayed local. And through that, tagging through the efforts of different community members like mailing those back, they learned that these turtles live a long time, they travel long distances. And they do come back to the same nesting beaches year after year. But how they get there is somewhere between magnetic sensing and like all these migratory things that we talked about with ocean species, right? They, they are able to have some magnetic sensing, there are some turtles like the leatherback sea turtle. They travel further north, but they do seem to have a signal that points them back south again. And that is probably sunlight based or UV based, they have a patch on their skull that is a little bit thinner. And it is thought that that could give them that indication of when it's time to start moving. It could be smells, it could be taste, it could be temperature time of year. They're all these different factors. And the most likely answer is it's all of the above that leads the turtles back to where they came from. I suppose it would kind of be like, how do you know your way back to the home where you grew up in? Like, I don't know if you could actually describe, like, just turn left at the tree. Yeah, that's yeah, so they've got this GPS. The only difference is they like hatch, head straight out to sea and don't come back for another 25 to 50 years.
Yeh not like us where it's like I've grown up there for my whole life. Yeah, yeah, they know. How is it the beaches where they hatch that they return to for breeding? What would happen? And you might I don't know if we know this. But if there is a beach that a turtle hatched, and then that beach was, you know, destroyed? Or you know, for some reason, they were not able to access that? Would they choose a different spot? Or do they just not breed?
That is also one of those big questions that scientists are still trying to narrow down more completely. It's, it's a question that's becoming more and more important with climate change. They like the nesting beaches that we tend to like, as far as like recreational beaches, you know, big sandy beaches, where they can lay their nests. And with sea level rise, some of those shallower beaches are becoming more inundated with water. They're making less viable nesting grounds. But we also since some of the nesting beaches that sea turtles like are some of the beaches we like to hang out on. We know that sometimes that might shift whether or not a sea turtle comes up to lay or comes up to nest. So we're still finding out the answer for that. And it's it's a long journey. We do know that when there were the shutdowns for COVID. There were some beaches that hadn't had not seen turtles nesting on them for a very long time, that suddenly saw sea turtles coming back and nesting on them, because there weren't as many people present. So it is possible that those turtles were either finding different places to nest and finally came back to their home beach. Or it's possible that they weren't nesting until then.
Wow. It's amazing to think about what impact human activity just being present in a space might and how that might impact wildlife. So not something we often think about is important. So I understand that temperature can influence the sex of the developing embryo in sea turtle eggs, is there anything that we can do to combat that given that global warming is likely to continue in the coming years?
So yeah, it's this really interesting development in reptiles in general and specifically in sea turtles that they do have a temperature range that is ideal for hatching of the cooler temperature yours hatching male sea turtles, warmer temperatures hatching female sea turtles and there's an ideal temperature range for hatching in general once it gets too warm, you don't see the hatching activity. It is already happening in many beaches that the sand temperature, the average or overall temperature is too warm for the sea turtles. And on some of those nesting beaches, we have volunteers who are actively working to try to shade the nests in place in situ. And they are seeing more success with that, then they see with removing the eggs and insulating them elsewhere, you just have more successful hatchlings if you can do it in situ. What's really interesting is that with these nestings, in some places, they're actually using the same shade structures that were used by scientists, when they first started looking at temperature based sex determination. And so they're building these like structures with sticks and leaves to shade the nests that were originally used to shade part of the nest. And then they would test the the sex of the turtle as it emerged. You can test with blood tests, sea turtles, in general, you can't really tell whether they are male or female until they're quite a few years old. That's when they start being a little bit sexually dimorphic. And it is not something we can tell even in the observations that we do. Because you can't really see that until you see the tail of the sea turtle you have to be under under the turtle to see it really,
Does there's a warmer temperature influenced development towards more male or more female animals?
more female. Okay, so we do see more female, but it's a pretty small window, it's only one or two degrees. And then after that, you get high mortality rates.
Pretty crazy to think of like two degrees makes a difference between male or female, or life or death, you know, for some of these animals,
and degrees Celsius, to be clear. Slightly more than in Fahrenheit, I guess, a small band quite Yeah, it's still a really small band. And it's really fascinating that we've got these animals that have been around since the time of dinosaurs that have adapted to all these different climates and eras and epics. And we're facing a time that may see at least a huge effect on their populations because of human made climate change.
Not to end on a...
I know.
Thanks for joining us!
We can end it on an umm... Okay, for our last question. So for some of our listeners who might encounter sea turtles in their lives or love sea turtles, what can people do day to day to help this these different species off our coast? How can people help?
Oooh, I think one of the biggest things that we can do is look at our look at our society, look at our culture, look at what we're doing day to day, and what the impacts are of each little thing that you do. What's cool about that is, I don't think of it as like, what is the negative impact? But, how can I make a positive impact? How can I change the world to be something cooler, something different, something more exciting? And you know, really, I have a son, he loves sci-fi, and really just looking at like, okay, well, what if I wanted a Star Wars type universe? What would that look like? How could I make a decision in what I'm doing on a day to day basis that leads to flying cars, or leads to like, how can cause we can I mean, we've, I've seen so much change just in my short life where we went from not really having ways to communicate to carrying around computers in our pockets. And this is really revolutionary, like the internet, being able to share things. We're on a podcast, sharing ideas. This is huge. So sharing your ideas with other people, thinking about what future you want to envision and manifesting that future like not just for what happens tomorrow, but what happens in 10 years. And like build that reality that it's really cool to be in a place where like, oh, we can like someone envisioned a freeway and built it and we could unbuild it.
We could do whatever we want. We're masters of our own destiny.
Yeah I mean, like everything we're working on. Somebody envisioned the aquarium and built it. And we have this way that people can explore this underwater world that they wouldn't see otherwise. That's incredible.
Well, I think that as a master of your destiny, it's very cool to see that you've chosen to spend so much time caring for these animals and doing community science and dedicating your sometimes your free time and volunteering your time for that. I think that's amazing. And I think that's a great way to get involved as well. So if you have community science projects local to you, and you're listening to this join in, if there are species you're interested in some of those science projects aren't even species specific. They're just anything. Everything is science.
And you make it sound so selfless, but in all honesty, it is completely selfish, it's just fun. No, like, it's so fun. And you with community science, you get to do all kinds of crazy things. I mean, I've stood out on beaches for grunion greeters, and gotten to see fish jumping up out of the water at like midnight. I've been able to explore bridges in the LA area looking for bats and listening to bats with these cool bat trackers. I mean, there's so much that you can do with community science, that's just a blast. It's a lot of fun. And yeah, so you make it sound really cool. Like I'm this honorable person, but it is completely selfish. And it's just, it's fun stuff.
Awesome. Cool. Thank you so much for chatting with us today. That was thank you so insightful. I think our audience learned a lot.
If you go to aquariumvolunteering.org Or just go to the Aquarium of the Pacific's website, that's just a shortcut to the volunteer page. If you go there, you can see all of our current openings for different programs. We have programs for people of all ages and backgrounds, from community science through being on site at the aquarium. If you're a family and you have kids aged eight and up, you can be family volunteers, we have teen programs and volunteers participating in all kinds of different aspects of the aquarium. It's really, really neat to be able to have such a amazing community of people.
All right, so next up, we have an interview with Adam Atlas, who is one of the aquarists here at the Aquarium of the Pacific. Hi, Adam. How are ya? Alright,
Hi!
Tell us a little bit about what you do here what your job title is and how long you've been hearing.
So I'm an Aquarist, obviously at the Aquarium of the Pacific, I work up in the tropical Pacific galley, the warm water exhibit. So I work primarily with our large tropical, Trop Reef exhibit. And the soft coral. If you've been here at some one where you walk through, it's a tunnel on either side of you. And the big window. That's a really big deep tank with the sea turtles inside of it. And then I also work with our main coral exhibit the live coral exhibit that if you walked by, it's got the bright pink and orange fish inside of that. And those are two exhibits I work exclusively with and they are very fun to work with.
Yeah, I bet it's a lot of work to oversee such a large, like aquatic exhibit like the trop reef is huge. How many gallons is it?
It is 350,000 gallons. Not only do we have two people, myself and one other person assigned to it. We also have the volunteer divers that do almost all of our cleaning ourselves, because if we had to do ourselves, we would that's literally what our job would be just non stop cleaning.
Cleaning 350,000 gallons worth of exhibit
That is a huge exhibit. I got to practice my like checkout dive in there. And although it was very fun, I was surprised at how big it is, especially when you're inside and you're like,
It's a lot bigger then it appears
So we have two of our sea turtles that live in the trop area.
Technically, yes. One that lives on the tropical reef, the big side the big side and then one that lives on the Soft Coral Garden side which, on the tunnel is the smaller side.
Okay, so tell us what their names are and who they are what species.
So on the tropical reef side, we have Copper, who was a green sea turtle, and then on the soft coral side we have Lou, who is an olive ridley sea turtle.
Okay. And Lou, I understand is a rescue turtle and was rescued with his friend Theo?
Brother. Yeah,
I don't think I knew that.
So, Lou and Theo have an interesting story. So what happened was before this aquarium opened in 1998, what happened was is that they were a batch of eggs being smuggled across the Texas border from Mexico. They were caught by customs and they brought the eggs over to I'm not sure where they were raised. They were not raised here in California, though. They were raised and they turned out that two of those eggs were fertile and they hatched out. They came here to this aquarium before we technically open so they are original residents of this aquarium and they've been here for the entire time because somebody tried to bring them across the border, but were fortunately caught
So we got those two animals and I don't think I even realized that they were charter animals, that they've been here that long, and my understanding is one of them now lives in our Shark Lagoon area?
Yeah. So Theo lives on Shark Lagoon, the main reason is just because they are large animals and we want to give them the space that they need. The nice thing about even though he's a sea turtle, the sharks out there don't actually bother him, even though they are large kind of risk fish. They leave him alone, he leaves them alone. For the most part,
I heard he kind of runs that exhibit. He's in charge over there
He's very, very food motivated. Let's just put it that way.
So those two animals are at least 25 years old. This is our anniversary, how long can an olive ridley sea turtle live?
So sea turtles in general, they only live to be about as long as human lives and human average human life expectancy is 73, I think, roughly. So they'll live to be about 80
So a pretty long lived species, but not as long not as long as 150 years
Not as long as a tortoise, which is the oldest tortoise just turned 188 I think.
That's an old tortoise. Yeah, have some tortoises here. But today, we're talking about sea turtles.
Tortoise and turtles not the same thing.
And then we have Copper. And copper is a green tea sea turtle?
A green sea turtle. He came from an AZA facility. He was raised there from an egg. He's a very young crazy teenager. He's only about 13. And he acts like a 13 year old.
So do they, in their maturity, sort of mature at the same rate as humans? Like is he gonna be a wild teenager from 13 to 18?
he's probably gonna be a wild teenager for 80 years.
I know some people like that,
Yeah, some people never grow up, some turtles never grow up.
He's like that guy that peaks in high school.
Poor copper. So what is different about taking care of our sea turtles versus some of the other animals that you care for?
So the nice thing about the sea turtles is that they are relatively low maintenance animals, that you're just making sure that they're not injuring themselves not attacking anyone else. And just monitoring their weight, doing physicals and making sure that opitmal health, and that's pretty much it.
And you weigh the turtles?
We do weigh the turtles. So because they do breathe air, we don't ever have to worry about bringing them onto land, we just make sure that they stay moist and temperature controlled. Otherwise, we can put them on land for quite a while. And it's really easy to weigh them. They're very heavy. So there have been those animals that they can't really support their own weight out of water, which is why when sea turtles come up on the beach are very clumsy. So it's really easy to just plop them up to a scale.
So are they trained at all to participate in that type of health care?
Yes and no. By I mean, trained to participate, they think they're getting food instead, they get scooped up when they think they're getting food.
That's part of the training someitmes
Well, they're target trained, right?
They are target trained, but the target training is "Oh, I think I'm gonna eaet, oh my god, what's happening?"
Well, going on a field trip,
Once in a while, if they get weighed when they get a snack, that's part of the animal care too. And it's probably good for us. How often do you have to weigh them?
Only once a year. They only do physical once a year. Again, they're very low maintenance animals.
How much do they weigh? Do you know?
Oh, Copper. He weighs 118 I think?
That's a big boy.
A few weeks ago? Yep.
And do you know about the other two?
Not off the top of my head but Copper is going to get significantly larger. Yeah, green sea turtles are the second largest species after the leatherback so probably get hopefully not 500 pounds. Potentially.
Wow, that's gonna be a sight to see!
A really big turtle.
If you've ever seen large turtles at other aquariums, it's almost certainly a green.
Okay.
What's the largest species?
leatherbacks
Do you know how big those get?
Oh, not off the top my head.
Pretty big, more than 500 pounds. So when we've talked about our sea turtles, and I think a lot of people think that they are exclusively herbivores, but when I've seen our food preparation for them, it seems like we include some other foods into their diet. So is it mostly based on environment or availability? Or what's their diet supposed to be like?
So mostly turtles are fairly carnivorous. So that's why, yeah, a lot of them when they're young, they eat jellies and some of them like leatherbacks eat jellies their an entire life but that's also why plastic pollution is a problem because they mistake jellies for, yep, you know the entire story with that. Animals like loggerheads, they will go after they're pretty generalist. Hawksbill, again, they have that long beak, which they can use to eat at encrusting organisms like corals to scrape at the algae but they also use that to pick at sponges. The green turtles are really the only one that are very herbivorous, which is why they get the name green sea turtles because the green diet causes their fat, not their skin, their fat to turn green, which is why they get those very beautiful colorations on their shells and on their body. And hence the name again green sea turtle.
Yeah, I see some deliveries of some super high quality produce show up periodically at our kitchen and I hear that those mostly go to our tropical reef
They go, I do. I'm the one who does all the veggie ordering for pretty much the entire fish and invert department. It can be anything from romaine to bok choy to bell peppers to enddives to
I get sort of jealous.
Delicious salad. Watermelon?
Watermelon on occasion. I do like to feed our animals watermelon on occasion. It is a sweet treat, though being sugary it's not something that it's like anything sugar you don't want feed that out very often.
That's funny. I don't think, do they like the watermelon? Do they...
They love watermelon. Again, it's sweet it's sugary, I mean, it does have good health benefits, but because it's very high in sugar content that only gets fed out maybe once a month, at most.
Yeah. Sort of a high value, super rewarding thing. For those guys, that's fun.
It's like junk food. Sometimes that emotional boost that boosting emotional health is better than the physical
And it's enrichment. It's all those things for them. Do our individual turtles have personalities?
Yes.
What are their personalities like?
Theo is king of shark lagoon. He makes sure that you know he's there, especially the divers, he will, you have to watch out for them. You have to watch them just for as much as sharks and I'll leave it at that.
He's a tough guy.
Lou likes to rip corals out, he likes to
He redecorates! We have some fun videos on TikTok of Lou redecorating the exhibit.
He does that. I don't know why he does that we can throw all the enrichment in the world and he'll still do that.
He has a passion for interior design.
Copper is just as kind of alluded to earlier. He's just this young, crazy teenager who's filled with energy. He's very interested in people. He doesn't care about the other fish. He doesn't care about the corals. He doesn't care about, he's food motivated of course, he doesn't care about any of that. You throw divers on the water though he's all over them. He likes to really that's interesting doesn't come at you like Theo might. He just likes being around. He'll follow you around. If you're on the bottom clean on the bottom, he'll just sit with you. And I don't know why. He's, I think it's just because he's been raised by people his entire life. He's just really desensitized.
He's like, Wow, interesting. Whatever you guys are doing is kinda cool.
He's very, he's very reactive to tactile stimulation and stuff like that. So he really he really likes people.
That was actually one of the things that we had as a question was, we were going to ask you if sea turtles can feel through their shells?
Yes. So it's not like a snail shell where that's something that is kind of separate from their body. That's an it's an outgrowth of their body. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, their shell is their skin. Okay, it's got neurons in it, they can feel that is tactile. Same thing with the underside, the plasteron of the shell, again, that is part of their skin that's not like its own, air quote, separate entity, that is their skin. And they can feel that. So if you were to take, say, of course brush to the shell, that feels very, very good. Yes,
We have some videos of that too. It's really sweet. Or we have some videos too I think of Theo in particular, scratching up against the, the rockwork and Shark Lagoon.
They'll do that themselves. But they really like it when, all of our turtles really like it when we do it.
A little help with an itch. So you said the bottom is called the plasteron?
Yes.
So we actually had a question from our Instagram. That was why does it look like they have six pack abs?
That's just the way the scales are arrange
That's what it looks like! They got lucky
Yeah, the scales are technically scuttles are the technical term are arranged
very cool.
Just arranged like abs. So the buffest turtle, buffest animals at the aquarium just by appearances.
You wouldn't think that with all the amount of time that they sleep
Well, that's good for there muscle development. So you touched on it a little bit. But is there any special veterinary care for sea turtles, do they get vitamin supplementation?
They do get vitamin supplementation, but that's really the only thing. The other thing is just a diverse amount diet. We also like Theo gets natural sunlight, but Trop Ree and Soft Coral do have natural skylights, or windows where sunlight can shine through it. So they do get their vitamin D through that. Occasional enrichment choices again, sometimes maybe an occasional treat, again, the tactile stimulation, brushing their shells is really good, especially if they have algae growth that feels really good for them. Otherwise, it's really just we pull them up once a year, take some blood samples, look at their eyes, look at their shell, look at their weight. And that's pretty much the only thing that we have to do.
Where do you draw blood from a sea turtle?
Actually right behind the neck. So basically, if you were to, if you're wearing like under on your t-shirt, like the back of your t-shirt, right where your spine.
Like where the tag is
Yeah, right where the tag is that's a better way of putting it. That's roughly the equivalent part you would pull blood from
Okay, that's interesting. I guess I never really thought about where did if you were drawing blood from a turtle for health purposes, where would you get that? The next question we have for you is a little bit of a weird one. But I heard that some turtles breathe through their I'll say cloaca to be scientific.
Technically. Yes, there are some. There are some turtles who can do that.
Do sea turtles do that?
I have never seen our guys do that. Not sure if our guys do that. As for other sea turtles, I have no idea.
Okay, so maybe but there are some species of turtle that have chloacal respiration is I think what they're calling it
They breathe through their butt.
Okay. That's how we say it around here
I'll say it, I'll be brave I'll say it.
And then I wanted to ask what is the most challenging part of working with our sea turtle collection?
Honestly, they're not the smartest animals. Working with them just in that aspect. It's like, oh, I want to train you. All right. Well, this is gonna be fun or we've say ah, Copper his last physical, we couldn't get him to come up because he kept trying to go back to sleep. And so we had to drag him up ourselves because I'd kind of wake him up and he'd start swimming around and immediately go back to a bottom and just sit there, he, there wasn't even any fight with him when we picked him up, he just wanted to go back asleep and it's very obvious even to the entire procedure that he was very not
not stressed, just napping
That's a good sign, right that his doctor visit was not stressful for him at all.
When he doensn't want to get caught it's very difficult to catch him. So the fact that he put up no fight, I was like, okay, you're barely awake. He doesn't wake up normally until about eight o'clock anyways.
Oh wow,
Same,
He's, it's very unsual to see him awake before eight.
That's so funny.
It's funny to think of how distinct of a personality and like routine they have in their own lives, too.
Because once he's awake, he's very energetic
Well, he sleeps a lot. So he can have all that energy
We got some questions from social media, actually. And they were asking about about how long they sleep underwater? Do they take naps?
Yes, they can sleep a few hours underwater because when they're sitting and they're sleeping, and the metabolism is really slow, and they're reptiles, so they already have have fairly low metabolism, they can hold their breath for quite a few hours.
That's fun. So if you see at sea turtle in our habitats that are just at the bottom, resting
Motionless a lot of the time
They are they are sleeping.
They are not dead, I can guarantee you that they are not dead. That's just what they look like. And sea turtles live just long, slow lives
That's the dream.
That's what I want, for me a long, slow life. Another question that we got from our Instagram was do sea turtles ever come out from the water?
Only females do to lay eggs. And that's pretty much the only time that they will do that.
So males will generally never,
Males generally once they leave the beach, that's it, they will never come back to land. They are very adapted to living in the ocean, and they are very not adapted to life on land.
So when you see those videos of all the sea turtles hatching out from a beach and just making a break for it, a lot of those as the last time they'll ever be on land
chances are yes
That's pretty cool. Yeah, never really realized that. How long can they stay underwater?
Kind of the same thing as when they're sleeping. They can spend on water for three hours for the low metabolism. But say if they're hunting, that can be over half hour. Obviously, they're using energy what they're doing that
Another question that someone asked was whether or not sea turtles can stick their head and limbs inside their shells?
No, they cannot. They're not like a tortoise where they can completely pull their heads and fins. And they can kind of tuck them to be flush against their shell, but they can't fully pull them in.
Okay, so if there are predators around and what kind of predators would they have? How would they protect themselves from those?
The main predators that they have just because of their size of their shell, well assuming they're adults, when they're young anything. When they're adults, really, the only things they really have to worry about are sharks. And the main thing with sharks is either out swim them or even sometimes fight back
So sharks can bite through their shell?
Absolutely. Tiger sharks, especially are sea turtle specialists. And if you look at their teeth, which literally have serrations upon their serrations upon their serrations, and that's not an exaggeration, it's pillars of serrations. They can just chew through that shell like it's nothing.
Wow. So it's a swim away situation. And do your best Yeah,
Triple serrated teeth on top of a very strong bite force. Yeah. And large size themselves.
We are going to talk about sharks in a future episode. So I think it'll be interesting to ask our shark expert what's the deal with tiger sharks?
That obviously sharks are their natural predators. But humans of course are absolutley their biggest
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, marine debris seems to be a really huge issue for sea turtles
Marine debris, collecting their eggs for as we talked about Lou and Theo, random poaching, but also people who harvest them for their meat for their shells. That's a pretty big thing.
So a good rule of thumb, if you see a sea turtle is to leave it alone and let it live its life out in the ocean.
So by US law, you're not allowed to approach a sea turtle. But then I don't you might know that answer from Hawaii? It's like, like 50 feet or something.
It's some amount of
It's some amount of feet. I don't remember. But yeah, there is a law stating that you cannot get within, I think it's like 20 or 50 feet or something like that with sea turtles. And if you get caught a lot of times, if you have a good tour guide, they will let their displeasure be known.
Well, and it's for the best, right? We don't want to disrupt these animals in their natural habitats. Do you think that our individual turtles recognize you?
They recognize people. Copper, especially he sees a person out in the water and he'll start falling you along the surface? That's also because he's very food motivated. And he just merely associates people with food.
He knows that there's snacks involved.
Yeah.
And what is their top speed?
Oooh, when they really want to go, Copper, god, he can probably hit a good five, eight knots if he really wants
Wow,
He can dart fast
It's funny to think because you usually see them like gliding, you don't usually see them booking it. But it's funny to think that they can
Yeah if wants to take off, I've seen him really take off, he can move fast.
Well, that sort of wraps up the questions we had from social media. But I was wondering, before you go, if you could tell us your favorite part about your job, and any interesting stories about our turtles, you'd like to share.
I mean, obviously, we're here for the animals. That's why we are here, we want to work with animals, we like animals, you want to be surrounded by animals all the time. Um, as the turtles themselves they're just fun, very large, charismatic animals and they have fun personalities. Copper especially is very much a favorite in the gallery. Because he's got a very, very rambunctious personality. And he makes it known we find them doing some very interesting things on his own accord, sleeping in weird positions, doing things that we don't know why he's doing it. He's just doing it.
We're not meant to understand the mind of a turtle.
Yeah, it's a very small mind with a very small gear that is spinning by itself
But it is doing something.
It's doing something but yup
Well, I think that's all the questions that we had for you, Adam, thank you so much for sharing.
That was awesome.
Yeah, that was a really nice wrap up of a little bit of our turtles here at the Aquarium. And if you guys want to see we again have which one was in Shark lagoon?
Theo
Theo is in our shark lagoon habitat. And then we have Lou & Copper who are both in our tropical reef habitat which Adam gets to oversee. So if you ever see a diver in the water, say hi, it might be Adam!
Aquarium of the Podcific is brought to you by Aquarium of the Pacific, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization in 2023. The Aquarium celebrates 25 years of connecting millions of people worldwide to the beauty and wonder of our ocean planet. Head to aquariumofpacific.org to learn more about our 25th anniversary celebration. Keep up with the aquarium on social media @aquariumpacific on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
This podcast is produced by Erin Lundy, Madeline Walden and Scott Shaw. Our music is by Andrew Reitsma and our podcast art is by Brandi Kenney. Special thanks to Cecile Fisher, and Anitza Valles, and our audio visual and education departments and to all of our amazing podcast guests for taking time out of their day to talk about the important work that they do. Podcific wouldn't be possible without the support of the aquarium's donors, members, guests and supporters. Thanks for listening!
