Vancouver Aquarium volunteers help sea turtles recover from Gulf oil spill

By Rhiannon Coppin, Vancouver Sun September 13, 2010 3:20 PM

At the Audubon Institute in Gretna, La., sea turtles suspected of swallowing oil spilled from the Deepwater Horizon rig are being fed mayonnaise and vegetable oils to help purge their digestive tracts.

To treat their exteriors, volunteers like Chelsea DeColle use Dawn soap, just as the television commercials claim. "It's the No. 1 detergent used to clean oil off oiled animals," she said.

DeColle, a 30-year-old veterinary technician on loan from the Vancouver Aquarium, tended to each of 167 turtles in her two-week volunteer stint at the Audubon centre in August.

Staff and volunteers repeatedly went through the same lists of animals -- the bulk of them green sea turtles -- checking their weights, appetites, wound-healing, medications and blood profiles, and sometimes taking radiographs. "Day to day was fairly similar," DeColle said.

The youngest and smallest patient, at one pound, was a two-year-old green sea turtle. The largest was a lone loggerhead of unknown age. Hawksbill and Kemp's Ridley turtles rounded out the temporary collection.

"Most of them were in fairly good condition and we were just maintaining them so that they could gain weight and meet all the criteria for release," DeColle said.

There were exceptions. One turtle that wasn't eating on its own was stressed at being fed through a throat tube. "The doctors ended up placing a tube that sticks out of the neck but actually goes to the esophagus through the skin," she said.

The skin was stitched up around the tube and the tube was glued to the shell, to make feeding a simple matter of injecting fish mush into the tube.

DeColle also visited with a bottlenose dolphin. "I got to participate in one procedure with it. We had to go in the water and actually take the dolphin out to put it on a scale and take blood samples," she said.

The additional training DeColle received and her exposure to new animals, procedures and people is a "win-win" for the Gulf Coast and for British Columbia, said Dr. Martin Haulena, 43, a veterinarian who helms the Vancouver Aquarium's mammal care team. Four staff veterinary technicians will each spend two weeks on the rescue effort.

"Certainly the animals and the people directly involved in the Gulf are benefiting from the expertise of some of the best vet techs anywhere," he said. "On the flip side, they're making friends and contacts and firming up relationships with other experts."

And should a marine oil disaster strike in B.C. waters, those connections will be vital.

Haulena's career experience has taken him to the front of many marine oil spills, mainly in California, where he worked for nine years, but also to the birthplace of the theory of evolution -- Ecuador's Galapagos Islands -- following a fuel-tanker spill in 2001 that killed many marine iguanas.

"There was a good amount of oil that could have potentially devastated one of the worlds' most beloved ecological reserves," Haulena said. "To have that kind of place affected by a man-made accident is a big deal."

An oil spill in B.C. would be an equally big deal, he said. Animals that use feathers or fur for insulation or buoyancy would be most affected. On the coast, an oil spill could wipe out flocks of migratory birds. It could kill many sea otters and other mammals, as we've seen on the Alaskan coast.

During DeColle's stint, 25 turtles gained enough weight to be released.