“Glad to see you rolling with the punches, Joliet,” Drake said. “Now, you two best get to that turtle. Do what you need to do and secure the body in the freezer by twenty-two hundred.”
Hawkins took a step toward the door. While the Darwin’s return to port was a blow to their mandate, he appreciated the bold approach it required they take. It was more his style. But then he paused and asked, “Why so fast?”
Drake frowned. “That storm I mentioned? It’ll be here tonight.”
4.
The loggerhead’s plastron—the underbelly—came free with a slurp. Joliet had drawn a scalpel around the turtle’s soft flesh that divided its top and bottom shells. The cut on a healthy turtle would have been shaped like a stingray, but this specimen, pinched at the midsection, had a figure eight-shaped body.
“Slowly,” Joliet said, pulling on the top half of the plastron.
Hawkins held the lower half, lifting up so the entire shell could come free at once. Bray stood behind a video camera, documenting the dissection. All three wore blue surgical aprons over their shorts and T-shirts, but only Hawkins and Joliet wore bright blue, elbow-length rubber gloves.
The turtle lay on a table at the center of the biolab, a four hundred-square-foot space on the port side of the Magellan’s main deck. Foam blocks had been wedged under the sides of the turtle’s shell, keeping it from wobbling, or from slipping off the table. Bright fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling illuminated the body. The only other source of light came from a single porthole, through which the sun—now heading for the horizon—shone brightly.
As the plastron lifted away from the body, the tangy scent of turtle insides wafted into the sterile-smelling “clean” lab, which normally smelled like bleach. Hawkins nearly gagged. He wasn’t sure which smell was worse—guts or bleach—but combined, they sent a wave of revulsion through his body and made him wince.
Bray lowered the camera and said, “Good God, that reeks.”
Joliet paused and looked at Bray. “Keep the camera up.”
Bray lifted his shirt collar over his nose and continued recording the scene.
“The plastron came free after cutting along the seam between the marginal and inframarginal scutes, and then along the posterior margin,” Joliet said, describing the work she’d completed. She tilted her end up so that it was facing the camera. “As you can see, the subject’s body is quite deformed.”
“What was the cause of this deformity?” Bray asked.
Joliet appeared annoyed for a moment, but then nodded. They hadn’t recorded that portion of the dissection. Hawkins and Joliet placed the underbelly on an adjacent workbench.
“The deformity of this specimen was caused by a thick band of red plastic, which we cut away.” Joliet picked up the hard plastic ring and held it up for the camera to see. “I’m not sure what its original purpose was, but there is some faint Japanese script, here on the side.”
She turned the band around so that all the text could be captured by the lens. “It seems likely that the turtle, still very young, swam through the plastic band, which then became stuck around its midsection. As the specimen grew, the ring restricted its growth, resulting in this severe abnormality. That it survived into adulthood is something of a miracle.”
Joliet moved back to the table and Hawkins followed, hoping he wouldn’t puke on camera. He’d been hunting several times in his life, but quickly cleaning out a freshly killed deer wasn’t quite the same as slowly poking around the insides of a decomposing sea turtle.
The inside of the turtle was bright red and pink mixed with bits of dull gray. Hawkins swallowed and turned his eyes toward Joliet, hoping her words would distract him. They didn’t.
“The ventral surface of the specimen is covered by three muscle groups.” She pointed to the exposed neck. “The longitudinal.” She pointed to the upper body, where a pair of feather-shaped muscles had been exposed. “The large pinnate, which power the turtle’s front flippers.” She moved to the lower extremity. “And the pelvic muscles, which we already separated from the plastron. Despite the upper and lower portions of the body being separated by the deformation, the muscles appear whole and healthy. There is no disease present.” She looked at Hawkins. “Hand me the knife.”
A metal tray next to Hawkins held three large metal bowls, sliding calipers, metal snips, scissors, hemostatic forceps, toothless forceps, tweezers, three scalpels of various sizes, a turkey baster, a pair of pliers, a hacksaw, and a razor-sharp knife that looked rather like a fishing blade. He picked up the knife, pinching the flat side of the blade between his fingers, and handed it to Joliet, handle first.
Knife in hand, Joliet made quick work of the large muscles, cutting them free from the shell, ligaments, and bone where they were attached. “Bowl,” she said.