A young loggerhead turtle, brought back to life at Dingle Aquarium, is hitching a ride on the LÉ William Butler Yeats Irish Naval ship to spend her teenage years off the Canary Islands.
Cróga, named because of her brave fight to live, was just a few months old and underweight when found upside down on a beach in Belmullet, Co Mayo on Valentine’s Day.
Most likely hatched near Miami, Cróga had drifted from the Sargasso Sea which acts as a turtle nursery, in a winter storm. Many of the turtles loosened from the seagrass of the Sargasso end up in the Carolinas and the coast of the Americas. It is unusual for one to make it as far as Ireland.
[ Six-inch loggerhead turtle from Florida discovered alive in MayoOpens in new window ]
Cróga was found by Cormac de Rósta and his daughters who were walking the beach.
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He alerted marine biologist and director of Dingle Ocean World Kevin Flannery. He drove to Mayo from Dingle to rescue the reptile who was in cold shock after her journey..
Flannery has been rescuing turtles for decades and has overseen the repatriation of several turtles back to the warmer waters of the Canaries and the Azores. Turtles move across from the gulf to the canaries to spend their teenage years and then back again.
Most of the turtles the aquarium rescues are older. Molly, found near Castlegregory in 2004 with her flippers injured from a shark attack, was thought to be in her 20s.
Revived with a mixture of saline solution injected into her lip and antibiotic treatment, Cróga recovered her appetite and has gained weight.
After being in the sea for 4,000 miles, she was dehydrated, Flannery said.
“How it survived is beyond my understanding. Usually, birds would have picked them off or a shark or something would have eaten it, or the cold shock from the water would have killed it,” Flannery said after meeting the six-inch turtle.
The body temperature of Cróga turtle was raised gradually, as were its basking waters in the aquarium.
Croga is now a healthy weight of more than 1kg, more than twice the weight she was when she was found.
Flannery began rescuing turtles before the construction of Dingle Oceanworld, reviving them in the bath in his home in west Kerry. Cróga is the eighth loggerhead to be revived at the Dingle aquarium. All are fed on a diet of mackerel, herring, spread and squid with added vitamins.
She was taken on Thursday morning to Haulbowline, the Naval Service headquarters in Cork in advance of the departure of the LÉ William Butler Yeats and its crew of over 50 on a six-week deployment to the Mediterranean.