Mysterious male turtles on the mend

Melissa Haneline

Dave Owens (left, center), director of the College of Charleston’s marine biology graduate program, looks over a sonogram of male sea turtle Edisto’s reproductive organs with Gaelle Blanvillain (bottom left) Wednesday at the South Carolina Aquarium’s sea turtle hospital.

College of Charleston Professor Dave Owens might have hit a gold mine, educationally speaking.

Just two weeks after the South Carolina Aquarium brought in the first adult male sea turtle in its seven-year history, another injured male was found off Edisto Island on Tuesday afternoon.

For Owens, who studies reproduction in sea turtles, it's a rare chance to scrutinize the mysterious males, who stay at sea all their lives. Even more fortuitous: both arrived at the turtle hospital right after mating season.

Owens and assistant Gaelle Blanvillain performed ultrasounds of the Cape Romain and Edisto turtles, both named for the areas where they were found, monitoring their heart rates, the amount of sperm they had left and their testosterone levels.

"This guy has been very (sexually) active, and there are several other good signs," Owens said. "We're

watching what we call regression, or the shrinking up of his reproductive organs, which is just an unusual opportunity. You don't normally get a chance to do that."

For the past two years, Owens, director of the graduate program in marine biology at the College of Charleston, has worked with adult male turtles through a joint study with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources.

"It (our knowledge) essentially was a big black box, and nobody had done a lot of work in terms of life history. Where do they spend their time? Where does the mating occur?" said Al Segar, a veterinarian who worked with the group. "Once they leave the beach as hatchlings, they never come ashore again."

Last year the team studied nine turtles, and this year they studied 20, measuring testosterone levels, outfitting them with satellite devices, and performing laparoscopic surgery to examine reproductive organs. They discovered that males don't mate each year as previously supposed and also that their migration patterns are very complex: some swim as far north as New Jersey while others head as far south as the Dry Tortugas.

On Tuesday, Edisto was found struggling off of Edisto beach, ensnared in a crab trap just like fellow patient Cape Romain.

Senior biologist and sea turtle program coordinator Kelly Thorvalson said the damage to the turtle's back left flipper is extensive, and in some places the bone is exposed.

"He'll live through it, but they're serious injuries, and until we get a little further into treatment, we won't really know where we stand," she said.

Though weakened, the turtles can still be a lot to handle, said Barbara Bergwerf, a volunteer who has worked at the hospital for the past five years.

"Both these turtles really are here because they're wounded, not sick," she said. That "makes this a challenge to do anything — to give them a shot, to move them. I mean, it took eight people to get him off the truck yesterday."

The public can view the animals at the Aquarium's Sea Turtle Gallery, where workers have set up a live video feed to the turtle hospital below.

Reach Lucia Walinchus at 937-5921 or at lwalinchus@post andcourier.com.