Unfortunately we lost both Marina and Bailey. They had very similar symptoms and conditions and though we were hopeful that with round-the clock monitoring and treatment we might be able to flush the toxins from their symptoms, we realize now that we were probably only prolonging the inevitable. Both died suddenly of cardiac arrest over the past week.

There are several “silver linings” to this cloudy story, but the best is that what we learned during the necropsies (animal autopsies) may help us treat turtles with similar conditions more successfully in the future. Last year Dr. Norton and a colleague had been performing a necropsy on a turtle that had died from a similar condition (presumably the same type of neuron-toxic poisoning). When they found a great deal of blood in the body cavity of the turtle they thought they must have nicked a large blood vessel while opening the turtle. However, BOTH turtles necropsied this year exhibited the same signs! Though all of the internal tissues and organs look normal, something had caused these turtles to hemorrhage internally which ultimately lead to their cardiac arrest. Dr. Norton suspects that there may be an anti-coagulant property associated with whatever poisoned the turtles. Because we had been treating these turtle for several days, we have a good series of blood and plasma samples as well as tissue samples from the necropsies. Scientists at several institutions along the coast are now analyzing these samples trying to isolate the toxin and one of our colleagues is in the early stages of developing an antidote for brevetoxin (the poison most commonly associated with red tide).

Though it may take a long time to really understand these toxins and find cures, in the short term we now hope that providing similarly afflicted turtles with Vitamin K and other drugs to promote blood clotting factors may help us keep them alive long enough to flush the toxins from their system. We expect to see more of these turtles in the near future so we’ll keep you posted on the progress of this work.

-Dr. Bill Irwin, Director