Six young turtles, healed and home: a beach in Florida waves them back to the Atlantic

They arrived with names like characters in a storybook — Frogish, Mangrove Snapper, Highland Cow, Nurse Shark, Armadillo and Silkie Chicken — six juvenile green sea turtles who came to Volusia County's Marine Science Center hurt or struggling, and left it healed. On 14 October, at the Beach Street Ramp in Ponce Inlet, Florida, the centre's rehabilitation team released all six back into the Atlantic in front of the public, and returned a rehabilitated juvenile brown pelican to the wild the same day. The centre does this at scale and in obscurity: since 1 January it has taken in 243 sea turtles, 250 hatchlings and washbacks, and 215 other reptiles, from gopher tortoises to freshwater turtles — each one treated with the same goal, a return ticket to the wild. Six turtles is a small number. It is also six whole lives, swimming out through the surf.

SDG 14 · Life below water — Mechanism: institutional program