Provided by the Island Turtle Team
The Post and Courier on a recent Wednesday had an article by Bert Keller, who writes the "Aging for Amateurs" series. He shared an encounter with a mother possum who had lost one of her babies in his yard. I was touched by his description of the feeling as they looked into each other's eyes. He spoke of "a moment when a wave of tenderness, a recognition of kinship, swept through your mind and refreshed it in the presence of the Other—some member of the natural world radically different from yourself."
This passage brought to mind a similar experience I had on the Isle of Palms beach one night in 2013. That night, Marty and Linda Bettelli were checking on a turtle nest they had found as members of the Island Turtle Team when they noticed a huge loggerhead female coming out of the surf. This turtle, which we had named 'Megamom' that year, was remarkable for the number of eggs she was laying every two weeks. The average nest contains about 120 eggs, but hers were often in the 160-plus range.
In our genetics research project, she has been named CC001942 and is possibly many decades old. Her nests were first recorded in 2010, the first year of the project. It’s likely she has laid about 35 nests, all on the Isle of Palms or Sullivan’s Island, except for four on Bulls Island in the earliest years of the study. Since we take a DNA sample from the eggshells of each nest to be analyzed by scientists at the University of Georgia, we follow her nesting career closely.
Megamom has nested in alternate years, typically on even years since 2010. She has not lived up to her name recently, as her last large nest was in 2019. However, it appears she has now laid more than 5,000 eggs since 2010. She laid her first two nests this season on Isle of Palms, Nest #2 and Nest #11. We don’t have DNA results for the rest of the season yet, but we do have an important clue.
When we saw her in 2013, she had possibly suffered a shark attack to the rear part of her body, losing almost a foot of her carapace (upper shell). There was considerable soft tissue damage as well, but she survived, and it healed. Those healed wounds have limited the range of motion in her left rear flipper, making her tracks distinctive on that side. Yet, she has stoically carried on all these years, laying eggs year after year despite her handicap.
This season, in addition to her first two documented nests, we have seen two other nests with tracks showing her distinctive left-side damage. So, even without the DNA results, we believe she likely laid Nests #22 and #35 as well. What a remarkable creature!
As I walked with her in the moonlight back to the ocean that night in July 2013, she stopped and lifted her head in my direction. Instead of pushing her 300-pound body ahead like an armored tank as they usually do, she paused, and our eyes met for several seconds in the moonlight. It was magical and memorable. As Bert Keller put it when he was with the possum mother, "It was a reminder that our tasks are essentially similar: the most important business in life is to look after each other."
