Wildlife Wednesdays: Sea Turtles Rescued In Texas

The prolonged arctic blast that plunged all the way south into Texas last week caused for snow and record low temperatures over an extended period of time. This led to many power outages across Texas, leaving residents without heat or electricity for several days. Not only were people affected, so were the sea turtles! Sea turtles are cold blooded creatures who need heat to survive, as they cannot produce it on their own. So when this cold snap occurred, it was very dangerous and deadly to the already endangered sea turtles. Residents across Texas started rescuing these sea turtles and taking them to a convention center in a South Texas resort town (Which also had no power at the time).

“Every 15 minutes or less there’s another truck or SUV that pulls up," Ed Caum, executive director of the South Padre Island Convention and Visitors Bureau, told The Associated Press.  He said "sometimes people bring one or two sea turtles, sometimes more. We had trailers full yesterday coming in that had 80, 100, 50,” he goes onto say. The South Padre Island Convention center started to help out and take in sea turtles when Sea Turtle Inc. could no longer take in the number of sea turtles being dropped off, due to capacity limits. 

They had collected more than 3,500 sea turtles during the arctic blast and luckily the power came back on middle of last week so they were able to bring the convention center's temperature back up to 60 degrees. The convention center and Sea Turtles Inc are waiting until temperatures warm back up so they can release them back out to the wild.