By Jane J. Lee, National Geographic
In a cringe-inducing video that’s gone viral, a team of scientists spent nearly ten minutes pulling a plastic straw from the nostril of an olive ridley sea turtle.
At first, “it looked like a worm,” says Christine Figgener, a sea turtle expert at Texas A&M University in College Station who helped the injured reptile off the coast of Costa Rica.
Figgener and colleagues were collecting data on sea turtle mating when they noticed something in the nose of a 77-pound (35-kilogram) male.
After team members extracted a couple of centimeters of the object with pliers and snipped off a sample, they discovered that the wrinkled, brownish object was a plastic drinking straw.
Assured it wasn’t a parasite that might have been attached to part of the turtle’s brain, the researchers decided to remove the entire four-inch (ten-centimeter) straw.
The team felt it was better to remove the straw immediately, since they were hours away from a veterinarian—and there was no guarantee the vet would know how to deal with a sea turtle. (Watch injured sea turtles get healthy in rehab.)
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