How Nickel, the Shedd Aquarium’s green sea turtle, came to Chicago

Some Midwesterners dream of trading winter for warmth by moving to Florida to start a new life. For Nickel, the green sea turtle in the 90,000-gallon Caribbean Reef exhibit at the Shedd Aquarium, the journey happened in reverse.

The turtle debuted at the Shedd Aquarium 20 years ago this month, but her epic tale began a few years — a nickel’s worth — earlier.

July 1, 1998, was oppressively hot and sticky in southwest Florida. Just how Matt Finn — a self-described “outdoors kind of guy” — liked it.

The conservationist had moved to Goodland, Florida, with just his dog and a boat and trailer hitched to his truck.

On that day, Finn and a colleague were exploring the Ten Thousand Islands, the largest expanse of mangrove forest in North America, for the Smithsonian Institution.

“We were coming down Fish Hawk Creek when I saw something in the mangrove trees that didn’t look quite right,” he said. “So I slowed way down and just kept looking. And then, there was this sea turtle.”

Finn, who had rescued animals in distress previously, knew the turtle was in trouble.

“The turtle saw us and was kind of afraid, so it went down beneath the water, but then popped right back up to the surface. That’s when we could tell there was something wrong,” he said. “So, we snatched it up and put it in the boat.”

Green sea turtles are endangered and highly protected, so Finn knew he had to tell the authorities about his discovery. He called the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

When Finn returned home to Goodland, Maura Kraus — and a kiddie pool — were waiting for him.

Sea turtle nesting season — roughly April through August — keeps Kraus, a longtime Collier County (Florida) Parks and Recreation principal environmental specialist, busy.

“We have a lot of territory and we had (Hurricane Ian) last year. Lots of turtles are making false calls and are confused because the vegetation is gone. So, they’re going places they shouldn’t be,” she said. “We’re having a rough year.”

In addition to keeping tabs on sea turtle nests, Kraus also fields calls about injured turtles.

Kraus remembers making the 30-minute drive to Finn’s home due to the handwritten report she still holds onto.

Along with a kiddie pool, Kraus had some towels and calipers in her van to get accurate measurements of the creature, which was then 23 inches long by 18 inches wide. Her report noted the juvenile turtle had a few abrasions on its plastron, or shell, with an open hole or sore near a long crack near its back left flipper. “An old wound,” she wrote next to the schematic.

Did she think it would survive?

“You know, sea turtles are pretty resilient,” she said. “Even when one is hurt very, very badly, their brain stays alive for a long time. So, you know, they’re survivors.”

According to FWC wildlife biologist Allen Foley, this was one of 424 stranded sea turtles rescued in 1998 with a vessel-strike injury. Foley estimates 2,800 to 7,020 sea turtles have died each year in Florida over the past five years due to boat strikes.

“Most (probably >90%) of sea turtles that sustain a vessel-strike injury die,” Foley wrote in an email to the Tribune. “So this turtle is very lucky in that regard.”

Kraus and Finn loaded the turtle into her van, then she traveled about 90 miles north on Interstate 75 to her next rendezvous.

“I picked up a lot of turtles from (Kraus), so I don’t remember exactly what happened that day.”

Glenn Harman now works in engineering for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. But 25 years ago, he was head biologist at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, overseeing the rescue of sea turtles and dolphins that became stranded around Florida.

Trying to diagnose the internal issues plaguing these animals was challenging, since diagnostic tools weren’t perfect.

“We did a lot of X-rays, CT scans and stuff like that, but their bones are so thick that the image gets kind of blurry,” he said.

Harman calls a turtle in this condition a “floater” since it probably had some spinal damage from the boat strike that made it impossible for it to dive and stay submerged.

Rehabilitation was easy, however, with this particular turtle. Its wounds were cleaned then dabbed with ointment, and a course of antibiotics was administered.

“With Pete, we put the turtle into the water and got it eating right away,” Harman said. “And that’s generally a pretty good sign that everything’s going to work out OK.”

The turtle now had a name — Pete — but nobody the Tribune contacted knew why it was chosen.

“A lot of times, we would name the turtle after somebody who found the turtle. Maybe we already had another turtle named Matt,” Harman said.

Since Pete was incapable of finding food in the wild due to its inability to dive for seagrass on the sea floor, it had to remain in captivity. Visitors to the Clearwater aquarium watched the light green turtle with a healing shell swim happily with its peers.

Every other Thursday, Michelle Sattler swims with just about as many sharks as she has years of service at the Shedd Aquarium. That’s when she dives into the 400,000-gallon Wild Reef exhibit.

Twenty-one years ago, Sattler was tasked with finding a replacement for a beloved Shedd icon. Hawkeye, a hawksbill sea turtle, died in July 2002.

Customs officials at O’Hare International Airport discovered the turtle in 1977 — tired, sick and about the size of a dinner plate — tucked into a tourist’s briefcase. Since then, Hawkeye served as an ambassador for his critically endangered ilk.

“Through another aquarist who was vacationing in Florida, I found out about Nickel, who was one of several rehabilitated turtles that needed to be homed,” Sattler said. “I thought it could be interesting and advocated for placing a rehabbed animal in their front and center exhibit and everybody thought it was a good idea.”

With approval from the state, Harman built a custom wooden crate and then draped Pete with moist towels to be kept calm. The precious cargo was shipped from Tampa and picked up at O’Hare by Sattler.

Pete had an X-ray taken and some blood drawn as part of an evaluation. That’s when the turtle was found to be female.

“Their tail size determines their sex, but when they’re juveniles all their tails are pretty small,” Harman said. “With Pete, we were taking a wild guess and I guess we were off.”

This exam produced an additional surprise.

“There was a coin lodged in her esophagus,” Sattler said. “So I was thinking to myself that depending on what this coin is, that maybe it could help name her.”

The X-ray showed there were actually two coins — a dime and a nickel — both of which have since disappeared. They chose Nickel for her name.

No special accommodations were needed before Nickel could join the Caribbean Reef, though Sattler enjoyed testing her capabilities. She encouraged Nickel to swim into a contraption made of pool noodles. When Sattler wanted to make weighing Nickel easier, she trained the turtle to swim to a platform and stay on it while it was lifted out of the water.

“I don’t know if this is an individual characteristic or if it’s common for all green sea turtles, but Nickel is a very quick study,” she said.

After spending 16 years with the turtle, Sattler knew exactly where to slap her shell so she would wrap her flippers around her hand in a “Nickel’s tickle.”

Sattler says the “pinnacle” of her care for Nickel was when she reunited Finn with the turtle he saved decades prior.

“He got choked up — I was worried about saying that because I didn’t know if he wanted me to share it. Just watching him interact with her also made me choked up,” she said.

It’s hard to know if Nickel responds to her lead trainer Brendan Gilloffo because she recognizes him — or because he has her favorite food.

Like Sattler, Gilloffo has continued to challenge the sea turtle to try new things and get some exercise. Sometimes he only has five to 10 minutes with her before she tires since Nickel can sleep from seven to 11 hours per day.

Now in her late 20s or early 30s, Nickel weighs about 210 pounds and is roughly 5 feet long and 2½ feet wide. She eats five heads of romaine lettuce per day, but tends to sneak some tasty squid and shrimp — despite being a herbivore — each time a diver enters the exhibit to feed the other 900 inhabitants.

“She knows she has no natural predators in here or anybody she should be afraid of,” he said. “Often, when I’m feeding the sharks, she’ll smack them out of the way without hesitation or reacting to them at all. So, she’s pretty fearless.”

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Gilloffo gets Nickel’s attention by sticking a yellow buoy lined with black tape on a long stick — it’s her signal to come to him. He takes a quick look at her eyes, shell and flippers, before bopping her on the nose. It’s a new husbandry behavior he’s teaching her. After the tap, Gilloffo expects Nickel to open her mouth for inspection. It’s a work in progress that he thinks will take her months to master. But Nickel has time.

A green sea turtle has an average life span of 70 to 80 years, which means Nickel should thrive into the aquarium’s second century and could even outlive some of her caretakers.

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