The world according to me....

This is a photo of a juvenile loggerhead (briefly without water while the tanks were being cleaned) at the rehabilitation center located at the Institute of Marine Sciences in Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands. Intrigued by the clean carapace, I asked if they had removed the barnacles when the turtle was admitted to the facility. After a long pause, I was gently informed that the large loggerheads in the Macaronesian islands rarely had barnacles on their carapaces, not even the nesting females in Cabo Verde. Once again, I learned the hard way that one should always take care when extrapolating from local experience to global expectation.