Sea Turtle Named Nutella Beats the Odds After Four Months of Intensive Care

They Weren’t Sure She Was Going to Make It

When the sea turtle arrived at the Turtle Hospital in Marathon, Florida last December, the care team wasn’t optimistic. She was tangled in abandoned fishing line that had nearly severed one of her flippers. Tumors covered her body and eyes. More fishing line had been swallowed. The staff named her Nutella.

‘Nutella was a long shot,’ Bette Zirkelbach, manager of The Turtle Hospital, told CNN. ‘And she is one that I seriously did not think was going to make it.’

On Earth Day, April 22, 2026, more than 200 people gathered on Sombrero Beach in the Florida Keys to watch her swim back into the Atlantic Ocean.

Four Months of Work

The road from arrival to release involved two separate tumor-removal surgeries. Laser therapy and honey - an unlikely pairing that worked - gradually massaged circulation back into Nutella’s compromised flipper. Over the following weeks, she passed the fishing line she had swallowed, a process the team monitored carefully.

She arrived weighing 15 pounds. She left weighing 20.

Zirkelbach described the treatment as one of the more intensive recoveries the hospital had seen. Green sea turtles are hardy animals, but the combination of entanglement, ingestion, and tumor burden Nutella arrived with would have ended most cases before they began.

Earth Day on Sombrero Beach

The release drew more than 200 spectators - families, schoolchildren, and volunteers who had followed Nutella’s recovery through the hospital’s social media updates. Before sending her back, Zirkelbach gathered the children present for a quiet lesson about sea turtle conservation, the fragility of the marine ecosystem, and why the work of rescue and rehabilitation matters.

‘We recently saw astronauts go to the moon,’ she told them. ‘And they looked back and saw one planet - one living planet. All of us are connected.’

Then Nutella went home.

A Larger Conservation Story

Nutella’s return carries significance beyond her own recovery. In October 2025, green sea turtles were officially reclassified from ‘endangered’ to ‘least concern’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature - the first time in four decades on the protected list.

‘Consistent hard work pays off in conservation,’ Bryan Wallace, a sea turtle expert at the IUCN, told NPR at the time of the reclassification. ‘We went from being pretty worried about green turtle populations to watching their numbers increase over the last few decades. When we do the right things, conservation works.’

Nutella was rescued just months before that milestone was announced. Her recovery - from fishing line to open ocean - is a small, personal chapter in that larger story.

What Comes Next for Nutella

The Turtle Hospital does not track individual releases with satellite tags in every case, so Nutella’s movements after leaving Sombrero Beach will not be documented. She returned to the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, where the waters she was born in have been protected under federal law since 1990.

For the team that treated her and the people who watched her swim away on Earth Day, the outcome was the only one that mattered. She was a long shot. She made it.

References: Rescued Turtle Nutella Is Sent Back Into the Ocean | Nutella the Long-Shot Sea Turtle Who Made It Home on Earth Day | Sea Turtle Makes Amazing 4-Month Recovery