After more than 20 years in a Kerry aquarium, Molly the turtle will begin her journey to warmer waters this morning.
The loggerhead first came to Dingle Oceanworld Aquarium in 2004 after she washed up on the Maharees in Castlegregory, Co Kerry, with severely injured flippers.
She will be flown on Thursday morning, covered in Vaseline so she does not dry out, in a specially made box to Lisbon in Portugal where Zoomarine, a specialist sea turtle rehabilitation centre, will meet her.
She will be further assessed there, then released into warm Atlantic waters and monitored with a satellite tracker.
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She will be flying with Frankie, a smaller turtle who was found along the coast of Belmullet in Co Mayo last November.
Oceanworld founder Dr Kevin Flannery said he is not sure what happened to her when she was found in Maharees but suggested her injuries could be as a result of a shark attack.
He reckons Molly got caught up in a storm in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean and was carried northward up into the North Atlantic and was too weak to fight a transatlantic current carrying her across the sea towards Europe where she ended up in Kerry.
“Like all reptiles, turtles can get too cold and they go into cold shock, and they can’t swim back down to the Gulf, and they get washed all the way up to the Carolinas and beyond into Boston and some get carried across the Atlantic to us.”
Flannery’s theory that Molly originated in the Gulf was confirmed some years ago when TCD graduate Dr David Duffy travelled over from the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience in Florida and took DNA samples from the Kerry turtle which matched those of Gulf turtles.
At first, he said, she was “quite small” and wasn’t great at swimming, but after some feeding and rehabilitation, she began to “thrive” in the tank.
Flannery believed Molly was only ten years old and weighing 12kg when she fetched up in Kerry, but 22 years later and on a healthy diet of squid, jellyfish and mussels at Dingle Oceanworld, she is tipping the scales at over 200kgs, making her a dominant force in her tank.
After being assessed and having blood tests carried out, Molly is now fit to be released back into the wild, not thought possible at first due to the extent of her injuries.
“We’ve been working closely with Zoomarine in Albufeira in Portugal, and we’ve come to the decision in conjunction with their experts that she is strong enough to go back to sea as she would now be quite capable of making it back to the Gulf,” said Flannery.
Flannery said he is “delighted” Molly is being released back into the wild. He assumes that once released, Molly will make straight for breeding grounds as X-rays show she has eggs.
“It is vitally important a breeding female gets released into the wild,” he said, adding the loggerhead species is endangered.
Molly shared a tank with sharks at the aquarium and Flannery said on occasion she would bite them, describing her as “a character”.
“She was in with our Sand Tiger Sharks which can grow to three metres, but she wasn’t long putting manners on them – her beak is virtually like a sharp knife – she can cut a lobster in half so whenever the sharks came near her, they knew all about it”
He said Molly was “fabulous” to look at and educated a lot people who came to visit, adding that education was the aquarium’s aim.
Oceanworld is 30 years old this year and in that time, Flannery said he has released 50 to 60 turtles back into the wild, with five released last year alone.
He said he expects this number to rise due to the impact of climate change.
Flannery explained that female turtles come to shore along the Gulf of Mexico where they lay their eggs on the beach. From there, the young turtles make their way to the Sargasso Sea where they continue to grow.
When storms and hurricanes hit, the turtles get pushed too far north and end up in colder water where they get hypothermia and cannot swim back to warmer waters. They may also get injured along the way, like Molly. They then wash up on Irish and sometimes British shores.
Flannery said a turtle hospital will soon be set up at the Dingle aquarium.
In a post on social media, the aquarium said: “The queen of the shark tank will be greatly missed by all of the team, as she has become part of the Oceanworld family, but we are excited for her new adventure.”
