Nine more turtles are on their way to the Animal Care Center today—including eight of the larger loggerheads. The season continues to break records with latest live admissions of Kemp's ridley and loggerhead turtles. Not only is the timing of this season unusual, this is our second-largest stranding season ever.

In a normal sea turtle stranding season, the last surviving animal washes up during the week before Christmas. Over 25 years, no more than a handful have arrived after New Year’s. But as an article in today's Boston Globe reports, turtles are still stranding on the Cape.

Photo: Jessica Rinaldi, The Boston Globe

Since last Friday, our sea turtle hospital in Quincy has admitted 13 loggerheads and four Kemp’s – probably two to three times more than all previous post-New Year’s turtles combined. The loggerhead arrivals are the beginning of the end of the stranding season, but they pose major logistics challenges as each animal takes up so much tank space.

Photo: Jessica Rinaldi, The Boston Globe

The very late season is the product of the abnormally high water temperatures in Cape Cod Bay that were 6-7 degrees above normal for most of the month of December.

Read the full article in The Boston Globe.