The moment the green sea turtle hit the veterinary emergency ward at the Aquarium of the Pacific, it was swept into a whirlwind of critical care starting with X-rays that revealed broken digits and infected lacerations in two front flippers and a 3-inch gash on its carapace. In a rear flipper, veterinarians found a fishing hook.
The 38-pound turtle had been trapped for nearly a month this summer in an intake channel near a Long Beach power plant, within range of people who tried to snag it with hooks or impale it with makeshift spears. The X-rays were the start of weeks of recuperation and rapid healing.
"She's been a good patient -- sea turtles usually are," aquarium veterinarian Lance Adams said. "Reptiles have an incredible ability to wall off infections, isolate them and heal around them."
This week, nearly two months after it was rescued, the turtle's condition had improved dramatically and it was cleared to return to the wilds within a week or two.
If the turtle's survival is remarkable, so is the place it will eventually be set free: a heavily industrialized stretch of the San Gabriel River where federal biologists recently discovered a resident colony of green sea turtles. Federal biologists have launched a study of this unexpected colony to determine its size and, most intriguingly, why it appeared in what hardly could be called tropical waters.
In the meantime, the patient formally registered as "green sea turtle 0802" was bulking up on a prescribed diet -- a gooey mixture of shrimp, squid and clam pieces -- and convalescing in a circular 7,000-gallon holding tank.
Earlier this month, Adams and an assistant lifted the turtle out of the tank and placed it on a foam pad in preparation for a routine examination.
Then Adams pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and set to work. He flushed the animal's wounds with anti-bacterial soap squirted from a plastic bottle and injected the most troublesome gashes with topical anesthetic. With long-nosed forceps, he dug into cuts to pluck out bone fragments and yellowish tufts of material he described as necrotic, or dead, tissue.
"We may see a little bleeding," he said, "which is great because we want blood vessels exposed in these areas so that they can bring oxygen to the tissue."
He smiled as red blood oozed from the wounds. At the end of the 30-minute procedure, Adams took photographs of the wounds to chronicle "how they have healed over time, and to use the images for future reference."
