The following was provided by the National Marine Life Center.
These sea turtles are the last group of the record 242 sea turtles that washed up on Massachusetts’s beaches due to hypothermia last November and December. Cold-stunned sea turtles strand in the late fall on Cape Cod.
Early Saturday morning the National Marine Life Center (NMLC) in Buzzards Bay prepared four charcoal-colored Kemp’s ridleys for an hour and a half ride north to Quincy. There, they joined twenty-eight more from the Aquarium’s sea turtle hospital to begin the Sea Turtle Trek’s long drive south.
The Sea Turtle Trek will give the turtles to officials from Florida Fish & Wildlife that Sunday morning. The group will select a release beach in the region, and forty-six endangered and threatened sea turtles will crawl down a beach to re-enter the ocean.