Bite-sized, I mean baby, turtles

Here's a little photo gallery of just-hatched and older rescued loggerhead turtles, via Fark. Sea turtles return to the same beaches to lay their eggs every year; ridley turtles even hatch en masse to minimize how many get snatched up by predators on the way from the nest to the water. I don't believe loggerheads coordinate their nesting, or at least not to the same degree as ridleys, but it's still pretty neat.

A couple years ago, I lent a hand for a few days when the rescue and rehabilitation team at work had a massive number of turtles in critical care. I mostly just did some minor life-support system maintenance (i.e., cleaning filters and pumps) and a bit of feeding. The turtles brought there are typically Kemp's ridley turtles, which is the most endangered sea turtle -- the population is probably around a tenth what it was a hundred years ago. That year, if I remember right, we had something like 1.5% of the world population of that species in the building -- a deceptively large fraction of a population for one place, but a depressingly small number when there's only a few thousand left. They're small, too, so when the weather turns cold in the Gulf of Maine, they don't have enough body mass to retain the heat needed to get moving south in time; being cold-blooded they often wind up with body temperatures around 25, 30 degrees Fahrenheit. That's around 50 degrees lower than they'd have in the summer, way too low for them to function. Most are found battered and extremely sick, but given treatment a good number do actually survive.