Release celebrates rescue of rare turtle
People who live along the Forgotten Coast, as well as those who visit, are accustomed to the sea turtle releases that regularly occur on the beach each year.
During the winter, the releases often will be of cold-stunned sea turtles (a collection of turtles is referred to as a “bale” or a “flotilla”) that have been pulled from the waters after plunging temperatures rendered them listless and lethargic. They’ll be warmed up and fed, and once temperatures return to being more favorable to these cold-blooded reptiles, they’ll be placed back into the Gulf, often accompanied by a large crowd of onlookers recording the event on their smartphones.
So, the release of a turtle on St. George Island on Wednesday afternoon, April 9, probably won’t strike those around here as being much out of the ordinary.
But the fact is, it was, and it came about due to human thoughtfulness and rapid response combined with animal resiliency.
The story begins on a sunny, windy day at about noon on Feb. 8 on the fishing pier on the St. George Island side, about a quarter mile down facing the bridge. Brittany Girardi and her boyfriend Jim Albertalli, from Horsehead, New York, were visiting in February for their fifth straight year, staying with his parents, Gini and Curt Albertalli, snowbirds for the past 15 years.
“We’re fishing off the pier, using shrimp and mullet as bait, when I felt something hook on my line,” said Girardi. “It felt strange. I didn’t know what it was but it didn’t feel like a fish.”
When Jim saw it come to the surface he could see it was a turtle that had bitten on her hook baited with shrimp.
“I instantly panicked,” she said. “I felt like sh**, first of all. So I started to reel in a little slower. There was no fight at all, it felt heavy.
“I thought ‘How am I going get this turtle out of the water?’” Girardi said. “I was prepared to drag my line, climb down the rocks and get the turtle. Luckily I didn’t have to do that.”
Turns out, a couple from Georgia who frequently fish off the bridge, had a new net and ring that they hadn’t even used yet, perfect for the task at hand, and so they dropped it down in the water and scooped up the turtle.
“I think she was already on the phone with the lab,” said Girardi. “We flipped it on its stomach, kept it shaded, kept it cool, as we waited for their arrival. We tried to see if we could dehook it ourselves, but the way she had swallowed it there was no way we were getting that hook out without causing any harm.”
The woman had called the Gulf Specimen Marine Lab in Panacea, which is about 47 miles east of the fishing pier. Girardi said they were on the scene in an hour at the very most.
Kelsey Waldo and Paige Parker, two of several Americorps volunteers who work with sea turtle rehab and aquatic care at the lab, were on the scene, lifting the turtle gently from a small wagon that Girardi and Albertalli had placed it in.
It was then the New York couple learned that Girardi had caught a critically endangered Kemp’s ridley turtle, the smallest sea turtle in the world and among only about 9,000 remaining worldwide. Named for Key West fisherman Richard M. Kemp, who first submitted the species for identification in 1906, they were once abundant in the Gulf of Mexico, with tens of thousands of females nesting at Rancho Nuevo, Mexico.
But the population crashed in the mid-20th century to a low of only several hundred females nesting in the 1980s. Intensive conservation actions on nesting beaches and through fisheries management have helped the turtles rebound, with bycatch in commercial and recreational fishing gear continuing to be the biggest threat.
The few remaining in the world are distributed throughout the Gulf and U.S. Atlantic seaboard, from Florida to New England. Adult Kemp’s ridleys primarily occupy nearshore coastal habitats in the Gulf that include muddy or sandy bottoms where their preferred prey are found.
”I had no idea it was the most endangered species. That is so strange,” said Girardi. “They were mindboggled at the place and the time of year. I still can’t believe it.”
Because the hook was lodged in the center of her neck, not too far down, Dr. Julie O’Brien, from CompassionVet, was able to remove it without having to call in a specialist.
Because the turtle’s tail is below the edge of the shell, they figure it’s a female, said Waldo, and they named her Artemis.
After several weeks of monitoring, to make sure she was eating, the lab determined Artemis was fit to return to the brine, properly tagged.
And from the manner in which she was waving her front flippers in apparent excitement as Waldo toted her to the water and set her down on the island beach, to the huge applause of the crowd, Artemis seemed no worse from the trauma she had undergone.
“I’m just very thankful for the people at the lab who take time out of their day,” said Girardi.
Meet the Editor
David Adlerstein, The Apalachicola Times’ digital editor, started with the news outlet in January 2002 as a reporter.
Prior to then, David Adlerstein began as a newspaperman with a small Boston weekly, after graduating magna cum laude from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He later edited the weekly Bellville Times, and as business reporter for the daily Marion Star, both not far from his hometown of Columbus, Ohio.
In 1995, he moved to South Florida, and worked as a business reporter and editor of Medical Business newspaper. In Jan. 2002, he began with the Apalachicola Times, first as reporter and later as editor, and in Oct. 2020, also began editing the Port St. Joe Star.