MIAMI – Sick and injured sea turtles have a new place to rehab in South Florida.
On Wednesday, Zoo Miami officially opened its new Sea Turtle Hospital.
The 1600 sq. ft. facility consists of five saltwater enclosures which will serve as “recovery beds” for up to 16 sea turtles that are brought in for treatment.
This facility is only the second sea turtle hospital in Miami-Dade, and the only one able to treat fibropapillomatosis (FP), a potentially deadly disease found in sea turtles that causes cauliflower-like tumors to grow on the skin, including the eyes and mouth, as well as internal organs.
Zoo Miami worked closely with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission on the facility which received funding from the zoo’s primary non-profit support organization, Zoo Miami Foundation.
In getting the hospital ready, the Zoo Miami Animal Health Team collaborated closely with several established sea turtle facilities including the Brevard Zoo, Loggerhead Marinelife Center, Gumbo Limbo Nature Center, and the Turtle Hospital in Marathon.
Prior to its official opening, the Sea Turtle Hospital has already received patients for emergency treatments. The most notable is a huge 388-pound female loggerhead turtle named “Baymax” that arrived from a Port St. Lucie site several weeks ago. She had suffered a critical injury from an apparent shark attack.
She arrived laden with eggs which she was induced to lay and were then placed in a man-made nest for incubation by a team from the Miami-Dade County Sea Turtle Conservation Program. The massive reptile required surgery to amputate what remained of her badly mangled front left flipper and has since been recovering well. The zoo’s animal health team is cautiously optimistic that she will be able to be released within the next few weeks.
