The Exorcist Turtle

On Wassaw Island, Georgia, USA, my collegues and I have the luxury of literally 'knowing' some of the loggerhead turtles we work with. That is, there are some turtles we have met long ago and have known for quite a few years. For instance, there is a turtle we call 'the Exorcist turtle'.

In ~ 1990 this turtle was found by me and my cousin, Ed Strohsahl, on the south end of the island. She was nesting and we had just begun to tag her when she suddenly seemed to stop breathing. She rolled her eyes upwards, opened her mouth and then let out a bellowing gurgle. As her mouth was open, you could see bright green algae growing all over her lower jaw and into her mouth. Because she appeared posessed and the algae resembled pea soup we dubbed her the Exorcist turtle.

Since then she has lived up to her name. The Exorcist has never had a nesting emergence where something odd hasn't happened. Once, she crawled from the ocean and proceeded to dig what looked like a nest in the surf. When we got to her she was laying eggs and they were being carried about by the surf. She even went the through the motions of covering while in the water! We collected the eggs and the man-made nest had a good hatch rate. Although, at this time we were wondering if we should help this turtle usher her genes into the gene pool. Nonetheless, the Exorcist continued to come back, occasionally laying nests in really good spots. However, these events were not graceful.

Another time she nested, in a good location, she crawled into the woods rather than to the ocean. We spent over two hours looking for her and another thirty minutes getting her back to the dunes and off to the ocean. The exorcist has also false crawled after running into a Spanish/American War fort on the north end of the island - a very large concrete structure. She has even gotten tangled up in a dead Christmas tree that was washed up on the beach.

The exorcist also has no visible carpace. She is covered by so many bryozoans and sea squirts that she looks like a chunk of sod with flippers. One night when I sampled her for epibiota I decided to remove everything from her shell - I guess I felt she needed a handicap. Anyways, one-third of what we have reported living on loggerheads in Georgia first came from this sample, including a wily polychaete worm that bit the fire out of me. In 1999 she laid five nests on Wassaw and there was a gap of four weeks in between nests 4 and 5. So, it was obvious she had nested elsewhere and deposited at least 6 nests that season.

The last time I saw her, in 1999, I had to swim into an alligator infested lagoon to retrieve the lost turtle that had been there for several hours after sunrise. Although she can be a pain in the rear sometimes, I miss her. Maybe we'll see her next season.