Growing up on a farm out in Mayhill, Bryanna Bradshaw didn’t seem destined for a life spent elbow-deep in sea turtle nests and shark nurseries. But somewhere between 4-H showings and family trips to the Florida coast, something clicked.
“A lot of people were like, you can’t be a mountain girl and do marine biology,” Bradshaw said. “One of the big driving factors is that I want to prove people wrong, that the two sides of the world can coexist.”
Now a rising junior studying marine biology at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, Bradshaw has spent her college years chasing that proof. Her new experiences span from sea turtle nesting beaches in Cuba to a rescue and rehabilitation internship at the Gulfarium Care Center on the Florida Panhandle.
Natal Homing and Blue Moms
Bradshaw’s first major fieldwork took her to Cuba on a sea turtle nesting research project led by one of her professors, who discovered a phenomenon called natal homing, the tendency of sea turtles to return to nest at the very beach where they hatched.
“Every year, we go back to see how often turtles come back to the same place,” Bradshaw explained. Her team tagged turtles, measured their growth since the previous season, and counted the eggs in each clutch — anywhere from 100 to 150 eggs at a time.
First-time nesters, or “blue moms,” tend to lay fewer eggs, with clutch sizes growing in later years. One especially devoted returning turtle, on her 10th visit to the beach, laid two nests in a single season.
Even with those numbers, the odds are steep. “One in a thousand sea turtles make it to adulthood,” Bradshaw said. Hatchlings are barely the size of a quarter when they emerge, easy prey for birds on the beach and fish once they reach open water. And that’s before accounting for people. “Humans don’t help,” she said. “That number has been getting worse.”
Boat strikes are a growing danger, Bradshaw said, made worse by fear rather than indifference.
“A lot of people don’t understand that if you hit them and call, then you won’t get in trouble,” she said. “They just see that sea turtles are protected, and they’re afraid of the fine that comes with harming the sea turtle, so they just kind of leave them for dead.”
Left untreated, a cracked shell traps air that prevents a turtle from diving to feed, exposing it to infection. Because a turtle’s brain sits so close to its skull, a skull fracture is often fatal, Bradshaw notes.
Bradshaw later beams as she shares treasured memories of 10 open-water dives she logged in Cuba, where she also saw a shark nursery and a hawksbill sea turtle, a critically endangered sea turtle species in the wild.
One Special Turtle
This past summer, Bradshaw got a firsthand look at the recovery side of that story during an internship at the Gulfarium Care Center, the only sea turtle rescue and rehabilitation facility in the Florida panhandle, meaning turtles arrived from as far away as Panama City, Pensacola, and Navarre.
Her first patient came in on her very first day: a turtle named Carlos, hooked internally and externally by a fisherman near Panama City.
“We took all the external [hooks] off during his intake. We did X-rays and found all the internal hooks,” Bradshaw said. The team fed him cotton balls to cushion the sharp ends of the remaining hooks as they worked their way through his system naturally. “I actually watched him naturally pass all of his hooks, which was so cool,” she said. Carlos cleared his line and hooks within a couple of months, free of any other health issues, and Bradshaw was there for his release.
“He’s my little baby,” she said.
Not every case is as straightforward. Bradshaw described debilitated turtle syndrome, or DTS, a condition where “their organs are shutting down so badly that they’re pulling calcium from their shell, so it becomes soft like your fingernail, and you can puncture their shell.” It’s one of the leading reasons rescued turtles turn up floating or entangled in the first place, she said, their bodies are simply not doing well before they’re ever hooked or struck.
What’s Next: Vet School and the Great Barrier Reef
“I want to be an aquatic vet, so I actually get to do more than just the intake and taking care of them,” Bradshaw said. “I actually get to do the surgeries and the diagnostics on them, and then also still work with a little bit of other animals: dolphins, sea lions, seals, manatees, fish. Kind of everything that’s at an aquarium.”
Eckerd’s curriculum shapes a lot of her path, too. Instead of traditional general education requirements, students complete a set of “perspectives,” including a global perspective and an environmental perspective.
“We don’t have general ed classes, so you don’t have to necessarily do an English, math, science class,” Bradshaw explained. “Really, the only way to get [a global perspective] is to go abroad and see the world.” That’s what’s sending her to Australia this coming winter term, where she’s hoping to dive the Great Barrier Reef.
Cloudcroft Kid
Long before sea turtles, Bradshaw was a fixture of Cloudcroft community life.
She joined CLOC (Cloudcroft Light Opera Company) at age 6 and stayed until she was 19, working her way from the youngest actors’ traditional freckle makeup up through bigger roles, including the Enchantress in Beauty and the Beast for the Alamogordo Children’s Theatre.
She also spent several years working at the Sacramento Historical Museum and Pioneer Village’s Haunted Village, first as a young “creepy soul keeper” and later as a “scream actor” in the schoolhouse scenes.
That theater background is following her to college.
This fall, Bradshaw is co-directing an Eckerd College theater production of Lost Girls, a story following Wendy after her return from Neverland as she tries to find herself in a world where Peter Pan doesn’t exist. It’s set to open in November after Thanksgiving.
She’s directing a cast of 12 “real theater students”, she said, and the project had to be pitched to and approved by the college’s theater board before rehearsals could even begin. She and a close friend are co-directing and designing the show’s costumes themselves, with help from students in Eckerd’s theater production class, building sets and props. “So I’m very excited for that,” Bradshaw said.
Bradshaw was adopted by her grandparents, Cindi and Dave Bradshaw, at age 7, and she credits that early chapter of her life with much of her drive. As the first in her family, alongside her older sister, to pursue a college degree, she said her goal has always been to build a life “beyond paycheck to paycheck.”
And, that life is full: a marine biology degree, a rescue turtle named Carlos somewhere out there in the wild ocean, a play to direct, and a trip to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef on the horizon.
Photos and handling were done under permit #25/26-197 and #26-055, under conditions not detrimental to these animals. We collected photos during routine exams, treatments, releases, and cleanings. Please do not attempt to recreate the contents of this image without proper authorization.
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What a wonderful story about a promising young woman!
Way to go, Bryanna! 🩵🐢