In December, a small green sea turtle was rescued off the coast of Key Largo.
She was dubbed “Nutella” by the care team, and when she arrived at the Turtle Hospital in Marathon, Florida, she was tangled in an abandoned fishing line and covered in tumors on her body and eyes.
Upon further inspection, the team realized that she had fishing line in her stomach, too.
“Nutella was a long shot,” Bette Zirkelbach, manager of The Turtle Hospital, told the Florida Keys News Bureau. “And she is one that I seriously did not think was going to make it.”
“In addition to having horrific fibropapilloma tumors on her body and her eyes, she was entangled in fishing line to the point that she almost lost the flipper due to lack of circulation and had ingested a lot of fishing line.”
Although she was in dire straits, the team leapt into action. Surgeons removed her tumors in two separate procedures, and her flipper was massaged back to life using laser therapy and — oddly enough — honey.
In her first few weeks at the Turtle Hospital, she also passed the fishing line that she had swallowed.
Green sea turtles, like Nutella, are a leading symbol for conservation success.
In October 2025, after forty years on the endangered species list, they were officially reclassified as “least concern” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
“Consistent hard work pays off in conservation,” Bryan Wallace, a sea turtle expert at the IUCN, told NPR. “We went from being pretty worried about green turtle populations to watching their numbers increase over the last few decades.”
“Not entirely out of the woods yet, of course,” he added, “but what the report shows is that, generally speaking, when we do the right things, conservation works.
On Earth Day, April 22, Nutella got to add her own chapter to her species’ success story when she returned to the ocean after four months of recovery.
As she was released from Sombrero Beach into the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, she was cheered on by more than 200 people.
For Zirkelbach, it was an emotional moment that tied back to a recent, more global achievement.
“We recently saw astronauts go to the moon,” Zirkelbach said, in reference to the Artemis II space mission. “And there are amazing pictures. And they look back … and one memorable quote I heard from them is that they saw one planet, one living planet.”
“So, all of us are connected,” she said. “And it’s important to remember that today on Earth Day.”
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Header image via Natalie Danko / Photo Design by Natalie (Handout cleared for editorial use)
