Maui Ocean Center Marine Institute gives injured sea turtles a fighting chance
story by Mona de Crinis
photographs by Daniel Sullivan
Amputation used to be the first response to injured sea turtle flippers, but the MOCMI team found a way to save honu from the knife.
Dustin Paradis lights up when he talks about turtles. As the director of Maui Ocean Center Marine Institute, he gets excited discussing the gadgetry by his side and how it’s instrumental in healing injured honu, the Hawaiian word for sea turtle.
“See this?” he asks, holding up a wand-looking thing that emits various frequencies of red and blue light. Just as he is about to reveal the million-dollar answer, the door to the small treatment room cracks open.
“We got a call. There’s a turtle stranding in West Maui,” someone unseen informs, the voice trailing off as the speaker moves through like a town crier with news of the day. “So sorry, but I have to go,” Paradis says apologetically, grabbing his gear as he darts out into the midday sun.
It’s a scene that unfolds regularly in Mā‘alaea, where the Institute operates adjacent to its titular benefactor, Maui Ocean Center. Part of a global network of marine parks owned by Coral World International — a longtime advocate of ocean health and biodiversity — Maui Ocean Center provides office and lab space, fresh and saltwater tanks, utilities and other in-kind support. In return, the scrappy marine conservation nonprofit is giving the island’s beloved sea turtles a helping hand.
While the two entities share space, part of a name and executive leadership under MOCMI board president and MOC General Manager Tapani Vuori, each operates independently. “He’s kind of our Switzerland,” Paradis quips of Vuori, whose dual role helps ensure synergistic flexibility in the always shifting nonprofit landscape, or seascape, in this instance.
Already in Maui Ocean Center leadership, Vuori accepted the GM position in 2002 on one condition: the greenlighting of Maui Ocean Center Marine Institute, a federally recognized nonprofit focused primarily on coral restoration and sea turtle stranding response and rehabilitation.
Vuori officially introduced the nonprofit marine institute at the International Union for Conservation of Nature conference on O‘ahu in 2016. Maui conservationist Cheryl King, a longtime community organizer of sanctioned turtle-rescue efforts, was brought on as a short-term consultant followed by the installation of the institute’s first director.
When Paradis first became involved with MOCMI programs in 2019, the institute primarily focused on turtle stranding response, research and education. Badly injured turtles, usually the result of boat strikes, shark attacks or fishing-gear entanglement, were transported to O‘ahu’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Science Center where the standard protocol for severely injured flippers was amputation. Once recovered from surgery, the turtles were returned to Maui and released.
There simply wasn’t the staff or infrastructure for extensive rehabilitation, Paradis explained. “A lot of hard decisions had to be made,” he said. There were multiple factors to consider, such as estimated age, injury severity, breeding potential, projected species contribution over lifespan, etc., not to mention further stressing already compromised turtles with confinement, plane travel and likely one less appendage.
Then Covid hit, shuttering state and federal agencies — including NOAA — which enlisted MOCMI to oversee turtle rehabilitation in the interim, believed then to be a few months at most. “That kicked us into the turtle rehab game,” Paradis said.
Witnessing the sheer scope of flipper damage from fishing-gear entanglement and other major threats left the young director wondering if amputation was the only solution. “You wouldn’t amputate an injured ankle on a human, unless there’s gangrene perhaps,” he theorized. “It felt a little like over-correction to cut off their flippers if there’s a chance at recovery.”
With MOCMI now providing more post-contact turtle aid under a cooperative agreement with NOAA, Paradis proposed that the institute undertake a higher level of critical care, “on our dime,” to determine the effectiveness of longer-term conservative treatment versus limb removal. Collaborating primarily with NOAA contract veterinarian Dr. Gregg Levine and MOCMI veterinarian Dr. Paul McCurdy, Paradis and his team developed a multimodal treatment approach to preserve injured sea turtle flippers.
Employing healing modalities including magnetic/laser therapy and massage to stimulate blood flow and repair damaged tissue, the MOCMI turtle team was soon saving hundreds of flippers from the knife. “We were successful from the outset. The status quo of sea turtle flipper amputations from entanglement changed completely,” Paradis reported with understandable pride, adding that such surgeries are now the exception rather than the rule. “Hundreds of patients have gotten to keep all four flippers.”
With amputations clearly in decline, Paradis and his crew are eager to share their results with the ocean conservation community and are planning to publish a peer-reviewed scientific paper detailing their successful work with lasers and other conservative healing techniques. By shining a spotlight on MOCMI’s success with flipper and shell rehabilitation, the institute hopes to raise awareness and funds for ongoing research and the construction of a dedicated MOCMI marine science center in Mā‘alaea.
Projected to be built within the next five to eight years on land adjacent to Maui Ocean Center, the four-story campus will have classrooms and meeting space for scientific, educational and community use; research facilities; and dormitory-style apartments for visiting scientists and students. In addition to furthering MOCMI’s vital conservation programs and encouraging collaborative studies and STEM careers, the marine science center will help feed local coffers wanting since the pandemic.
“We are intent on developing a new economic leg by bringing more people like Dustin [Paradis], more marine scientists, to Maui,” Vuori said. One of only three places in the world where sea turtles lumber to shore for a daytime nap [the other two being Galapagos Islands and Australia], the Hawaiian Islands offer a unique opportunity to study and better understand this popular ancient aquatic reptile, Paradis further explained.
If visiting humpback whales define the Maui mystique, the Hawaiian green sea turtle is the undisputed animal ambassador, drawing hordes of curious onlookers when basking en masse along island shorelines. Ropes often separate observers from large basking events as it is illegal to touch, harass or come within 10 feet of this federally protected species.
Keeping tabs on and protecting local turtle populations is critical in monitoring ocean health, Paradis said. An indicator species, sea turtle instability could signal an ecosystem upset which, from a purely economic context, could devastate Maui’s tourism industry dependent on the island’s unmatched natural beauty and rich marine life.
Operating with a full-time staff of four, including Paradis, MOCMI’s robust volunteer roster fills in the gaps, with some volunteers pre-dating the institute in turtle rescues through earlier grassroots efforts helmed by King and others. Whether in the turtle yard assisting with daily cleaning, feeding, treatments and patient notes or in the water offering on-site relief or capture for treatment, MOCMI volunteers are “the foundation of our field-response program,” Paradis said.
After turtles are admitted for rehab, the patients are microchipped internally with PIT tags commonly used for cats and dogs. For the short-term, identification numbers are lightly etched into shells, or carapace, and painted. After about a year, the carapace etchings disappear as the permanent PIT tags continue to reveal repeat offenders, with one turtle coming through the system six times. “We’re like, ‘C’mon man, I know you want that easy snack on the line, but you better figure it out,’ ” Paradis said with a laugh.
Encountering a turtle previously released from entanglement is not uncommon. Hawaiian green sea turtles consistently return to the same habitat. “We find a lot of turtles are reported multiple times because our in-water teams know the reefs, the spots where turtles go to feed, rest and clean themselves,” Paradis said.
The art of distinguishing individual turtles, which sport unique scale patterns on their face and flippers, developed over time for MOCMI volunteers Bruce Weyermann and Alan Espiritu. “You also discover their habits, when and where they sleep and eat,” said Weyermann, eyeing the rocky shoreline beyond Kīhei Beach Resort’s lush grassy knoll. “I can point out where they probably are right now.”
The married couple had barely unpacked after moving to South Maui in 2015 before they jumped at the chance to participate in sea turtle rescues. For these MOCMI volunteers, seeing previously triaged turtles turn up hearty and healthy is worth the many hours of unpaid labor and salt-puckered skin. “When you see an individual you assisted earlier, you really get that sense of reconnection,” Weyermann said, “plus the satisfaction of knowing you were part of its recovery.”
For Espiritu, the bond has a more spiritual bent. Before he enters the water, whether as a citizen scientist or simply a citizen, he meditates on sending energy to distressed turtles nearby. “I sort of quietly chant, letting the turtles know that we’re here for them,” he said.
Whatever they’re doing appears to be working as the pair have a knack for locating distressed turtles, assisted with more than 1,000 turtle rescues to date. “We’ll go in for a snorkel and, sometimes within a few minutes, there’s an entangled turtle in the same spot, at the same time, that needs freeing,” Espiritu said. “I don’t think it’s coincidence. I think the turtles are looking for us.”
And they very well could be. A symbol of longevity and mana (life energy) in Hawaiian culture, the amphibious honu are considered a type of ‘aumākua or ancestral spirit uniting earth and water. While myths and legends involving honu are many and varied, the tale of Kauila — a turtle that assumed the shape of a young girl to help guide and protect keiki in the ocean — is a well-known retelling of the honu as guardian angel.
At MOCMI, Paradis and his mostly volunteer team are flipping the script. Just shy of guardian-angel grade, the lifesaving work they do is near sacrosanct for both human and reptile. While it is patently unscientific to assign anthropomorphic qualities like gratitude and appreciation to a turtle, Paradis shared a story of one long-term patient with second thoughts about his regifted freedom.
Upon releasing a rehabbed turtle near Honokeana Bay, an in-water team member wearing a GoPro camera recorded the large male underwater swimming off without hesitation. However, drone footage shot from above captured a much different outcome. After initially skirting away, the turtle turned and followed its unwitting liberator back to shore before finally heading out to sea.
It’s moments like these that drive MOCMI staff and volunteers into the water time and again, upending their plans in a heartbeat for a distressed honu. “They’re incredibly resilient with an amazing capacity to heal,” noted Paradis, who’s witnessed turtles in the wild recover from gruesome injuries — back flipper and part of their shell missing — that would permanently sideline most living things.
Since time immemorial, the enduring sea turtle has managed to survive when other species could not. Maui Ocean Center Marine Institute is committed to continuing this trend through rescue and recovery programs designed to keep Maui Nui’s honu healthy.
“The turtles do all the hard work,” said Paradis. “We’re just helping them out.”
