In 2004, a loggerhead sea turtle washed ashore in Castlegregory, Ireland with severely injured flippers.
The sea turtle, dubbed “Molly,” was then taken to Dingle Oceanworld Aquarium, where she spent the next 22 years in recovery.
Oceanworld founder Dr. Kevin Flannery told The Irish Times that they can never be exactly sure what happened to Molly before her rescue, but he believes that her injuries were the result of a shark attack.
Regardless, the team said that the loggerhead turtle was clearly far from home.
Flannery theorized that Molly had been swept up in a storm that carried her from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico into the cold waters of the North Atlantic, where she grew cold-stunned and was pulled by the force of a transatlantic current to the shores of Kerry.
Flannery’s theory was confirmed several years ago, when Trinity College Dublin graduate Dr. David Duffy travelled to the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience in Florida and compared Molly’s DNA samples with samples of Gulf sea turtles.
They matched.
“Like all reptiles, turtles can get too cold and they go into cold shock, and they can’t swim back down to the Gulf, and they get washed all the way up to the Carolinas and beyond into Boston and some get carried across the Atlantic to us,” Flannery explained.
When Molly first came to Dingle Oceanworld Aquarium, she was “quite small” and frail, despite an estimated age of 10. She barely weighed 26 pounds — more than 200 pounds below the species average.
Now, 22 years later, after rehabilitation, swimming exercises, and a steady diet of squid, jellyfish, and mussels, Molly weighs 440 pounds.
That means she’s finally ready to return to the wild.
“We’ve been working closely with Zoomarine in Albufeira in Portugal, and we’ve come to the decision in conjunction with their experts that she is strong enough to go back to sea as she would now be quite capable of making it back to the Gulf,” said Flannery.
In Portugal, Molly will receive one last assessment before she returns to warm Atlantic waters under controlled and monitored conditions.
“This is a very emotional moment for all of us,” a spokesperson for Dingle Oceanworld Aquarium said.
“Molly has been part of our lives for over 20 years,” they continued. “While it is incredibly difficult to say goodbye, our priority has always been her welfare, and we are delighted that she now has the opportunity to return to the ocean.”
You may also like: Over 4,000 sea turtle eggs were at risk of being bulldozed. These volunteers came to their rescue
