{"id":213309,"date":"2026-03-20T19:33:06","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T19:33:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/213309\/"},"modified":"2026-03-20T19:33:06","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T19:33:06","slug":"how-a-corpus-christi-aquarium-runs-one-of-the-nations-largest-wildlife-rescue-operations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/213309\/","title":{"rendered":"How a Corpus Christi aquarium runs one of the nation\u2019s largest wildlife rescue operations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let\u2019s go back to those turtles for just a moment. Typically, what happens to those animals once you get them? And how fast do you have to respond?<\/p>\n

If it\u2019s a cold-stunning, it\u2019s actually a really intense about seven or 10 days.<\/p>\n

So the cold weather comes through, it takes about 24 hours for the turtles to become basically hyperthermic and they\u2019re unconscious. We\u2019ll go out, rescue those animals \u2014 along with our partners from the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department, the general land office \u2014 bring those animals in.<\/p>\n

We warm them up just like you would see a human during a cold front. We let them swim. And if we see that they\u2019re swimming actively, once the water in the Gulf is back up to about 58, 59 degrees Fahrenheit, we release them.<\/p>\n

So it typically is seven to 10 days they\u2019re here and we then get them back out.<\/p>\n

\u00bb GET MORE NEWS FROM AROUND THE STATE:\u00a0Sign up for Texas Standard\u2019s weekly newsletters<\/a><\/p>\n

Gotta get them past that stress point. Speaking of stress points, what\u2019s your stress point? Do you have space for staff, coordination with partners? What\u2019s the pinch point for you?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s always staff. It\u2019s always the human side of what we try to do.<\/p>\n

So we\u2019ve got a rather large facility. We actually can make the whole program mobile. So, we can actually put this program on the road. We could go recover thousands of animals anywhere we actually have a road.<\/p>\n

So, it\u2019s intense, but there\u2019s a lot of really good partners that we work with at the state and federal level. It\u2019s a lot fun.<\/p>\n

For someone listening far from the coast, I think that some may be asking themselves, well, okay, what\u2019s the real-world impact of this work for me if I\u2019m in Amarillo or Austin or someplace else? Why should I care about what\u2019s happening there in the bay?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a great question. So we went down a study, we worked with a firm that does some very, very interesting economic impact studies. And we worked with some experts on sea turtles and coastal fisheries and some different things.<\/p>\n

And we came to find that a turtle that\u2019s released from our program has a pretty significant economic value to the state of Texas for fisheries. The green sea turtle population keeps the seagrass beds healthy, which is where all the fish that we all fish for grow up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Let\u2019s go back to those turtles for just a moment. Typically, what happens to those animals once you…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":213310,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[155,157,156],"class_list":["post-213309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-corpus-christi","tag-corpus-christi","tag-corpus-christi-headlines","tag-corpus-christi-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213309\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}