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A cold-stunned Kemp’s ridley sea turtle lays in the sand at Great Hallow beach in Cape Cod on December 3, 2020.
Photo: Lauren Owens Lambert / AFP (Getty Images)
For decades, volunteers in Cape Cod Bay in Massachusetts have spent November and December trekking up and down the area’s beaches during high tide. They have a very important mission: finding stranded sea turtles that are so cold they can barely move, leaving them essentially defenseless on the shore.
The sea turtles that experience this are suffering from a form of hypothermia known as cold stunning. It can be caused when water temperatures rapidly decrease to below 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius), and turtles are unable to move to warmer waters.