If you live on the Space Coast long enough, you will meet someone who volunteers at it. The sea turtle hospital at Brevard Zoo has been running since April 2014, when the East Coast Zoological Foundation opened it, and it treats turtles found along this stretch of the Florida coast. The zoo uses two names for it. Most people here still say Sea Turtle Healing Center, and the zoo’s own conservation page now calls it the Sea Turtle Rehabilitation Center. Same place.
What is actually in there
Two separate holding buildings, with fourteen tanks between them, ranging from six to twelve feet across. Patients arrive for reasons that are mostly our fault: boat strikes, fishing line, swallowed plastic, or what the zoo calls general debilitation, which is the polite term for a turtle that has run out of reserves.
Some arrive with fibropapillomatosis, a virus that grows tumors on the outside and inside of the animal. The zoo’s veterinary staff remove those with a carbon dioxide laser. Treatment otherwise is a mix of medication, surgery and feeding, run by veterinary staff and volunteers.
You cannot visit it, and that is deliberate
The facility is not open to the public. That surprises people who assume it is a zoo exhibit. It is a hospital, and the patients are wild animals due to be released, so keeping them away from crowds is part of the treatment rather than an oversight.
What you can do instead is support it. The zoo takes direct donations and keeps an Amazon wish list of things the center actually needs.
If you find an injured turtle
This is the part worth remembering, because it is the one that might matter to you on an ordinary Tuesday. Do not put the animal back in the water and do not drive it anywhere yourself. Call the Sea Turtle Preservation Society on 321.206.0646 and they will take it from there. That number is the one the zoo itself gives out.
A much larger facility is coming to Port Canaveral
In a development that will change what this county can handle, the DSF Charitable Foundation, through David and Sara Scaife, gave $5 million toward the Scaife Family Sea Turtle Care Complex. It will sit inside the planned Aquarium and Conservation Center at Port Canaveral, at 13,000 square feet, with a hospital and an outdoor lagoon habitat, and the zoo says it will nearly double its capacity for sea turtle care.
Dr. Trevor Zachariah, the zoo’s Director of Veterinary Programs, put it this way: “The new facility will empower our team to respond swiftly and decisively to the urgent needs of endangered sea turtles.” The gift and the plans are set out on the zoo’s announcement.
Why I bother writing about this
People move to Brevard for the beaches and then find that the beaches come with obligations: lights out during nesting season, fishing line in a bin rather than the water, giving a nest a wide berth. The hospital exists because those things do not always happen. It is a fair picture of what living on a barrier island coast actually involves, and it is one of the better reasons to be here.
If you are looking at homes near the water, the Melbourne Beach and Satellite Beach pages cover what the barrier island is like to live on. The Sea Turtle Conservancy is worth a look if you want the wider Florida picture.
