For the last five years, Folly Beach, South Carolina has held Toby’s Earth Month Island-Wide Spring Litter Sweep — an annual event that brings locals together for a community-wide beach cleanup.
“An important part of being a member of the community is to come down and help out,” volunteer Emerson Reece told local news station WCSC. “So we came down this weekend. I made like a two-and-a-half-hour drive today to make sure I was down here on time.”
During the event on April 12, volunteers collected over 10,000 pieces of trash in under two hours.
“What we do is born of our love for the ocean and our love for the environment,” said Sarah Butler, volunteer and executive director for the nonprofit Waves 4 Women. “And so, if we’re not good stewards of it, then it’s not going to be here for us to be part of. So, this impacts everybody.”
During the beach sweep, volunteers spotted something struggling in the water — a young Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, which is one of the most endangered sea turtles in the world.
“This was Folly Beach’s first stranding of our 2026 season,” Dave Miller, of Folly Beach Turtle Watch, said in a statement. “This turtle is a large juvenile Kemp’s ridley sea turtle. There are seven species of sea turtles in the world. The Kemp’s ridley is the smallest and most endangered of the seven.”
“Kemp’s ridley sea turtles rarely nest in South Carolina,” he explained. “They primarily nest on beaches in the Gulf of Mexico. They nest in large groups together and are the only sea turtle that nest during the day.”
According to Miller, the sea turtle had been hooked in the mouth by an angler off the Folly Beach fishing pier. Fortunately, when the rescue team raised the turtle using a drop net, the hook dislodged on its own.
“When a sea turtle is hooked by a fisherman, it’s important that the fisherman not try to remove the hook from the turtle’s mouth,” Miller advised. “The line should be cut, leaving several feet still attached. This makes it easier for the veterinarian to locate the swallowed hook … If a hook had been swallowed, the turtle would have been transported to the Sea Turtle Care Center.”
About a week prior, on April 4, another Kemp’s ridley sea turtle was found stranded on the sandy shores of Mustang Island, Texas. The female turtle was spotted by lifeguard and marine biology student Nevaeh Vela, who quickly realized that she was having trouble breathing.
Later, when the sea turtle was picked up by specialists from the Amos Rehabilitation Keep at the University of Texas at Austin, they discovered that she had a fishing hook fragment lodged in her trachea.
Fortunately, the team was able to remove the fragment safely with an endoscopy.
“The turtle is being monitored closely, and [she] is on antibiotics, pain medication, and anti-inflammatories,” ARK staff supervisor Andrew Orgill told Chron.
Unfortunately, the sea turtle’s predicament has become all too common for Orgill and his colleagues.
“Discarded gear is sometimes referred to as ‘ghost gear,’” Orgill said, emphasizing the importance of leaving the beach and ocean cleaner than you found it. “Other impacts include deep lacerations, flipper amputations, inability to swim properly, ingestion of baits, hooks, and line.”
It was an advisory that local Turtle Watch volunteer Vanessa Oltman echoed after the juvenile Kemp’s ridley sea turtle was rescued on Folly Beach.
“We only have one planet, and this is it,” Oltman said, through the voice of local mascot Toby the Turtle. “So, without the animals that we have on Earth, the wild and marine life, we will not exist either, because we are all supposed to coexist together. So, it’s very important that we teach the children from small all the way up how important it is to pick up litter.”
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