Sea turtle weighing up to 600 pounds found dead on the Outer Banks, puzzling rescuers

A sea turtle weighing more than 600 pounds was found dead Saturday on the Outer Banks, and experts are puzzled over what caused its death.

The animal was identified as a leatherback sea turtle — an ancient species unchanged since the dinosaur eras — and a photo shows it was found amid the needle grasses on the Pamlico Sound side of Hatteras Island.

The nonprofit Hatteras Island Wildlife Rehabilitation said one of its volunteers found the dead turtle.

“It is fresh dead and I didn’t see any obvious signs of trauma,” the group said Saturday on Facebook. “Samples were taken for an aging study, but we won’t really know why it died. It is also in a pretty rough location for necropsy and moving a 600 to 800 pound turtle by hand isn’t likely. They are beautiful creatures that we know so little about.”

Cold-stunned sea turtles — those paralyzed by a sudden drop in water temperature — are often found along the North Carolina coast this time of year. But that was unlikely in this case, according to Hatteras Island Wildlife Rehabilitation.

“Normally they are greens, Kemps (ridley) or loggerheads,” the group said. “Leatherbacks can handle colder water so we really don’t know what happened here.”

The agency posted an update Monday, saying the company Endurance Marine supplied a barge at no cost to transport the turtle so it could be examined by National Park Service experts. A field necropsy determined it was a juvenile male and likely washed up dead near Frisco two days earlier, the update said.

“We found (there) is no apparent physical trauma, no plastic in the intestinal track (we did not strain for micro plastics though), and no major parasitic load, so no smoking gun,” the group said. “We did find several organs that suggest the animal was under some physiological stress of some kind.”

The Frisco-based group treats ill and injured wildlife on Hatteras Island to “restore animals to good health, then release them back into the wild.”

Leatherbacks are the world’s largest sea turtle, known to grow to 1,000 pounds and 5.5 feet in length, according to NOAA Fisheries. The species is “highly migratory,” traveling 10,000 miles annually.

“They are the only species of sea turtle that lack scales and a hard shell and are named for their tough rubbery skin and have existed in their current form since the age of the dinosaurs,” NOAA reports. “The leatherback population is rapidly declining in many parts of the world. They face threats on both nesting beaches and in the marine environment.”

This story was originally published January 11, 2021 at 7:34 AM with the headline "Sea turtle weighing up to 600 pounds found dead on the Outer Banks, puzzling rescuers."