Aaron Hughes shook his head of golden locks as he watched the sea turtle row its flippers through the air in vain. The poor guy was so sick he didn’t realize they had plucked him out of the Indian River Lagoon for a ride in their skiff. Or maybe he had devoted his last ounce of turtle strength towards escaping.
“Looks like the dude’s freaking out,” Aaron told his professor.
“What did you expect? He’s sick and he doesn’t know we’re helping him,” said Dr. Herbert Swartzman, the head of marine biology at the Atlantic Marine Research Institute. Although they were based out of Fort Pierce, the professor and his grad student had taken the 12-foot skiff up the lagoon to a spot not far from Kennedy Space Center.
Hiking up his board shorts, Aaron leaned down and examined the white tumors covering the green animal like mushrooms popping out of the grass after a rain. They were painfully wedged between its flipper and its shell, stuck on the corner of its mouth and atop its head. One especially cruel tumor covered half of its left eye.
“That’s nasty,” Aaron said. “The poor guy can barely swim.”
Aaron combed through his memories for the name for the tumors, but couldn’t dig it up. Swartzman didn’t need another reason he should consider his student a beach-brained slacker. He already had plenty, like his penchant for surfing during breaks between classes and then showing up with his wetsuit under his t-shirt or how he signed up for every outdoor assignment and avoided the lab coat as if it were a straight jacket. If he could help this sea turtle, instead of just hoisting it from the water like a deck hand, Swartzman would have a new-found respect for him. But he couldn’t remember that damn name.
“We talked about these tumors before,” Aaron said. “You called them…” Pausing, he waited for his professor to finish off his sentence before it became a question.
“Just in case you had your head in the sand that day, I’ll remind you that those tumors are called fibropapillomas,” Swartzman said, as he programmed the tracking beacon he had selected for their shelled subject. “As they spread, they hinder the turtles’ ability to function and can get infected. I’ve seen a lot of them in the lagoon over the past month, mostly from Cape Canaveral through Melbourne. The turtles in the ocean are barely affected.”
“So whatever caused this started in the lagoon and hasn’t spread across the Sebastian Inlet,” Aaron said. About 20 miles south of Melbourne, the Sebastian Inlet connects the lagoon to the Atlantic Ocean. It also spawns some gnarly waves.
“What do you mean something ‘caused’ this? It’s just a disease. It’s probably spread turtle to turtle.”
“But you don’t know how. You didn’t tell us what caused it, right? So nobody knows?”
“Nobody knows for sure,” said Swartzman, who wouldn’t jump out on a limb if it were ten feet wide. “But fibropapillomas wasn’t started by something in the lagoon. It’s been found as far back as 1958 in the Pacific. The only thing new is how rapidly it’s spreading here.”
“You sure that’s the only thing new? What about this?” Aaron pointed to a tumor on the underside of the turtle’s neck, near its jugular. While all the rest were white and lumpy, this tumor was purple and smooth as a marble. It looked like a purple bead had been half-way imbedded into the turtle.
Easing off the throttle so the skiff slowed to a glide, Swartzman peeked underneath the turtle’s head. His eyes widened. Aaron had never seen anything astonish his teacher-anything scientific, at least. He had looked plenty perplexed when Aaron showed up on the first day of class with a mask and flippers over his shoulder like a masters course in marine biology was Scuba Diving 101.
“That’s not normal, is it doc?”
“No, it certainly isn’t normal.” Swartzman couldn’t take his eyes off it. “I don’t know how you missed it when you got it untangled from the mangroves.”
Like the professor didn’t miss it too, Aaron thought.
“Think it’s some kind of infection inside the tumor? Whoa. Maybe we discovered a totally new disease!” His dreams of making scientific journal headlines were dashed when he saw his professor’s sour expression. Keeping the animals in the lagoon healthy had been the man’s life’s work. “I mean, it would totally suck if it were a new disease hurting these turtles.”
“Yeah.” Swartzman sighed and combed his fingers through the Brillo Pad of hair remaining on the sides and back of his pointy skull. Out on the water in a polo shirt and khaki shorts, he had clearly come expecting his student would tackle the dirty work in the lagoon, and that chore looked like all he expected out of Aaron.
I’m capable of so much more. These guys have been spinning their wheels for decades trying to figure out what’s wrong with these turtles. If I could crack this case…
“Hey! Greetings there Herb!” shouted the only boater in the lagoon who used a megaphone. Harry Trainer, the Lagoon Watcher, inched toward them in his boat, which had been decorated with a paint-by-numbers marine life scene. He drove that boat as slowly as an old lady on the Interstate. He wouldn’t chance hitting one of his underwater buddies.
Taking his focus off the unidentified tumor, Swartzman stood and waved at his former research partner with a welcoming grin. “Come on over, Harry. I’ve got something pretty weird. That makes it right up your alley.”
They had worked together when Trainer was the chief biologist at the Ocean Village theme park in Orlando about a decade ago. Aaron hadn’t exactly seen the two lagoon-loving scientists chatting over beers, but he figured they kept in touch even as Trainer took his research solo-not that he had any choice.
Aaron linked the crafts together with a line and Trainer hopped aboard.
“That’s a nasty case of fibropapillomas the fella has there,” Trainer said as he shook hands with Swartzman.
“I’m afraid it’s more than that,” the professor said.
Aaron gently wedged his fingers beneath the sea turtle’s head. This time the shell-brain bobbed its head up and down and snapped at him. He had seen sea turtles act so aggressively only when fighting for mates. Aaron hoped he wasn’t giving this sea turtle the wrong idea. Finally, he caught the turtle under the jaw and lifted it so they could see the purple tumor.
Nodding plainly, Trainer didn’t seem the least surprised. The Lagoon Watcher had just about seen it all in this 156-mile estuary.
“I take it you’ve seen this before,” Swartzman said.
“Sure have,” Trainer said.
“What the hell is it?” Aaron asked. His professor shot him a demeaning glare for interrupting the conversation between the real scientists.
“Well, shucks, I wish I knew,” the Lagoon Watcher said with a yellow-toothed grin that gave Aaron the willies. It reminded him of a carnival worker’s assuring smile as he welcomes people on a creaky ride where he knows they’ll puke their guts out.
“It has me stumped too, but we’ll take a sample back to our lab,” Swartzman said.
“Yeah, I tried that,” Trainer said. “Still working on the results. I’ll tell you though. This is what happens when you dump sewage and lawn pesticides and motor fuel into the lagoon. And then there’s all the sulfuric and phosphorus run-off from the farms. They’re turning a national treasure into toxic soup. This is what happens!”
He waved his hand at the sick turtle. It flinched.
After encountering the Lagoon Watcher on missions with other professors, they told Aaron that Ocean Village had fired him after he “went off the deep end” and started publicly criticizing the theme park’s management for holding dolphins and orcas in captivity. He compared their crowd-pleasing shows to slavery and their marine mammal plush toys to the old derogatory depictions of blacks in cartoons. Then he called for the closure of every farm in Central Florida until they built water purification systems along the canals leading to the lagoon. Bringing too much controversial pub to the tourist attraction, Trainer got the boot. His former bosses didn’t exactly write him any glowing endorsement letters that he could leverage into a new job.
Aaron couldn’t tell whether Swartzman still respected Trainer for his groundbreaking research or whether he admired him for doing something the docile professor couldn’t: showing he had a pair and sticking up for what he believed in.
“There’s no doubt that conditions in the lagoon are worsening,” Swartzman said. “Just the other day, I read a report from the Water Management District saying the pH level in the lagoon has dipped a little low-hedging dangerously towards acidic. But it occurred in isolated spots only.”
“Maybe that’s why this tumor is purple,” Aaron said. “The changing water conditions are causing new diseases and mutations.”
While Swartzman ignored him, Trainer eagerly nodded. “You see what I’m talking about, don’t you? We must sound the alarm. We must put strict measures in place to protect this lagoon before it spirals out of control.”
Swartzman shrugged and scooted away from the Lagoon Watcher. All of a sudden, he couldn’t lock eyes with his old pal. “I don’t know, Harry… I need to understand this better before I declare a full-blown emergency. It’s one purple bump on one turtle.”
“It’s more than that and you know it!” The Lagoon Watcher stepped up and shook his finger in the professor’s face. “Don’t make this like the NASA incident where you crawled under a rock when it was time to go to war.”
Swartzman rubbed his palm across his sweaty forehead. Aaron had never heard about Swartzman and NASA. As much as it piqued his curiosity, he figured his professor had suffered enough degradation for one day. Turning his back on the turtle, Aaron nudged between Swartzman and the Lagoon Watcher.
“All right, hombres, no need to dig up all your battle stories from the Civil War,” Aaron said. “We’ll slice up this purple tumor like a sushi roll and then we’ll ring you up, Watcher man.”
The Lagoon Watcher chortled as he clutched his dried-out sea star pendent. “I’ll be waiting for that call.” He turned and bounded back aboard his boat.
As delighted as Swartzman had looked when Trainer had arrived, he looked twice as relieved when he left his skiff. Those two old men had a real love-hate bromance, Aaron thought.
While they watched the Lagoon Watcher ride off, they heard a big splash behind them. Aaron whirled around so fast that he nearly fell overboard. He saw the restraints that had held the sea turtle stretched out and torn. The sickly shelled one had gotten away. He didn’t think it possessed the strength to wiggle out of those restraints, much less have its flippers hoist it over the side of the skiff.
“Oh crap! Now look what you’ve done!” Swartzman shouted. “I told you to keep your eye on the thing.”
“Come on. I had to save your ass from that guy.”
“Who said I needed saving? Harry is not a violent person.”
Aaron didn’t have any evidence that suggested otherwise, but he had a hunch that the passion Trainer had for defending the lagoon could turn ugly if the guy got worked up. Yet, he should have known that Trainer didn’t pose a physical threat. Otherwise, there’s no way Swartzman would have let him on board.
Aaron’s paranoia had cost Swartzman his most important discovery in years.
“I’m sorry, doc.” Aaron hung his head and took a seat. “I should have let you handle it while I watched the turtle.” He gazed out over the water, where the beads of sunlight bounced off the gently-sloping waves. “I swear I’ll get him back.”
“There’s no need for that.” Swartzman turned a dismissive shoulder to his student and took the skiff’s wheel. “I stuck a GPS tracking device on the sea turtle. He won’t get far, but he needs time to calm down after this traumatic day. Next time he’s in our area, we’ll pick him up.”
Even though Aaron hadn’t completely blown it for them, Swartzman still carried a hefty dose of disappointment in his voice. That was a tone Aaron recognized all too well from his father. If this relationship deteriorated that severely, he’d never get his degree.
Luckily for Aaron, he’d have no shortage of opportunities at discovering freakish phenomenon in the lagoon.