going on focused on letting people know about sea turtles and the
environment, getting them more active and sensitive about those issues.
That is a lot of amazing work you are doing. The rescue center is
working all year, right?
Exactly, we are here all year round, especially the rescue and rehabilitation
team of sea turtles is 24/7. You never know, you can’t plan when a sea turtle
is going to be found sick or injured.
And what are the most common injuries when it comes to turtles?
There are a lot of threats for this specific species. Regarding the Rescue
Center the main reason they are coming in is because of deliberate injuries,
mainly on the area of the head, so they are inflicted by people. You can
understand- if the head if affected, you don’t know if the turtle is going to
have neurological issues. Those animals need more time to recover than the
others. Unfortunately, they are the biggest percentage of animals coming
here. Of course, we have cases of turtles that have ingested a hook or fishing-
lines. Also, mainly during winter, we have some cases of sick turtles suffering
from hypothermia. They are one of the “easy” cases because they are
recovering quite fast, usually by the time of spring or summer they are ready
to be released. We also have quite a lot of cases of entanglement in fishing
nets or fishing lines, usually mainly the area of the flippers is injured.
Does plastic waste, other than fishing nets, cause problems?
We have had cases of plastic ingestion during the years I’ve been here. Plastic
pollution is everywhere, and I am also pretty sure they have ingested
microplastic, which is very difficult to detect but, as I said, the majority of the
turtles we are treating suffer from head injuries. Two years ago, we did a
research, collecting the organs: esophagus, stomach and intestines of sea
turtles who unfortunately passed away at the rescue center. We did a post-
mortem and collected samples from those organs, and eventually, in
collaboration with the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, we found out
that all of these turtles have ingested plastic pieces.