The world according to me....

Responding to dead stranded turtles is a major part of our job here in North Carolina. We collect basic information from the turtles, including location, size, condition, possible cause of death, sex and stomach contents. We also have a suite of samples to be collected for various researchers, depending on the species of the stranded turtle, whether or not it had been previously tagged, and also likely cause of death (e.g. if it appears to be diseased). The most commonly collected samples are flippers and eyeballs. Both go to the Ageing Project of the Cetacean and Sea Turtle team at the NOAA-Beaufort Lab. There, Larisa Avens and Lisa Goshe (above) use various histological procedures to process the bones in the eyes and flippers, with the ultimate goal of trying to determine the age of the turtles. The work they do is amazing, and appears to be a promising method to definitively determine how old a turtle is at the time it died. It is also good knowing that samples from stranded turtles are contributing to increased knowledge about sea turtles.