Requiem’s flapping flippers almost sounded like bird wings fluttering as Morgan Flannagan, a Georgia Sea Turtle Center hospital technician, pulled the green sea turtle from a rehabilitation tank. Flannagan dried the turtle off and took it inside to the center’s hospital room.

“Sea turtles don’t have health insurance,” said Michelle Kaylor, the Jekyll Island center’s director. She and a crowd of center visitors watched Requiem through the hospital room’s public observation window as the endangered turtle was fitted with a microchip on June 6. The turtle, whose sex is not known, was nearly ready to be returned to the ocean since arriving May 3 with a large J hook embedded in its esophagus.

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