Duan March

Research project: Clinical health assessments of green turtles (Chelonia mydas)

Duan is a veterinarian at Dolphin Marine Magic, a marine park in Coffs Harbour that rescues and rehabilitates marine megafauna, including sea turtles. After eight years of seeing the same presentation in hundreds of turtles and continually battling to identify reliable prognostic indicators or diagnose a primary cause of disease, he decided to enrol in a PhD specifically investigating sea turtle health.

His project will investigate blood and tissue changes in rehabilitation animals as well as wild healthy populations in an attempt to describe the pathophysiological changes that are occurring in stranded marine turtles. Hopefully the characterisation of these processes will enable the development of more targeted treatment regimes and create a diagnostic pathway that is capable of identifying the primary disease processes.