"The turtles that come in with lethargic loggerhead are telling us a story," Mote's veterinarian, Dr. Andy Stamper said. "They're sentinels for their environment, and their health problems could indicate problems in their environment."

Typically, when sea turtles arrive in our hospital, they are extremely ill and suffer a range of afflictions — from ingesting fishing gear or being struck by boats, to having fibropapilloma tumors or lethargic loggerhead syndrome.

Over the years, Mote's Sea Turtle Rehabilitation Hospital has treated and released more than 100 sea turtles after providing state-of-the-art critical and chronic care for the sick animals. Sea turtles are listed as threatened and endangered and our mission is to rehab these animals and return them to the wild. We seek to expand our knowledge of the care and treatment of these species and to better understand the threats and illnesses they face in the wild in order to support sea turtle conservation.

For animals that are released, Mote makes every effort to do follow up monitoring to determine the success of the release and add to the basic understanding of the short- and long-term movements of these animals. Suffering animals with no hope for survival are humanely euthanized.

Before releasing Padme and Ahsoka, Mote scientists fitted them with identification tags and passive integrated transponder, or PIT, tags. A PIT tag is a microchip inserted under an animal's skin that can be read with an electronic wand. (The same kind of chips used to identify dogs and cats.) In the case of nesting turtles, PIT tags provide information about where and when the animal was tagged so scientists can recognize them when they return to shore.

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