Endangered sea turtle found dead and stuck inside bar stool in Florida

An endangered sea turtle has been found dead and stuck in a barstool after what conservationists fear was “an awful death”.

Photos of the turtle show it bloodied and stuck in a metal bar stool on a sandy white beach in Florida, but a conservationist who was called to come remove the body said it had been dead a long time by the time it was found because the body was bloated and decaying.

“It kind of looked like that’s what inhibited it. Once it got in it couldn’t get out,” Sharon Maxwell, a volunteer with South Walton Sea Watch, said, noting that she suspects that the sea turtle drowned even though the state of the turtle’s carcass had made a necropsy impossible.

“If you’re caught in a chair in the middle of a gulf … and you can’t do what you normally do then, that was my assumption — that it wasn’t a fun death,” she continued.

The turtle was a Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle, which is a turtle species that has been classified internationally as critically endangered as a result of human activities and products — like discarded or lost barstools, for instance. But, other activities have led the turtles to the brink of extinction as well, including humans collecting their eggs, the hunting of the turtles for meat, and accidental destruction of their nests by fishing trawls.

Ms Maxwell said that she does not where the barstool came from — she suspects it fell off a boat, perhaps — but that she thinks there is a broader lesson to be learned from the death of the turtle.

She said that sea turtles can be found all over the world, and that sandy beaches are crucial environments for them to nest — and, of course, those places are simultaneously locations humans tend to flock to to relax and enjoy themselves.

“Sea turtles nest all over the world. Everywhere,” she said. “And I’ll just bet that everybody has the same sort of problems with people. It’s hard for human beings, I think, to share the beach with sea turtles.”

To try and make sure sea turtles remain safe and have nesting grounds, she had a few suggestions: Clean up any trash you have, don't dig holes on beaches used as nesting grounds for turtles, and don't shine your car headlights on those nesting grounds, either.