GO WILD! SEA TURTLES AT WONDERS OF WILDLIFE

Hi, I'm Peter Gros from Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. We're here at Johnny Morris's Wonders of Wildlife National Museum and Aquarium.

These magnificent aquariums are a great place to introduce your children to the wonders of the marine world. The reef you see behind me is like the rain forest of the ocean that has literally thousands of species of marine life - turtles and fish and coral. A lot of people don't even know the coral is a living thing. Aquariums like this are learning how to grow coral, take it to the wild and grafted, creating even more hope for us to save our undersea world, the home of thousands of species of plants and animals.

We're here with Mike Daniel, the curator. Tell me about some of your your programs working with the animals in the wild.
We've had the opportunity this past year to work with 12 cold-stunned loggerhead sea turtles.

How long did it take to get them healthy enough to be released back to the wild?
So we were fortunate to have our turtles here for about three months and our expert animal care team spent hours and hours making sure that their body condition was improving, that they were getting stronger, before we could release them back into the wild to be vital parts of their natural ecosystems. We have two female green sea turtles here in our open ocean exhibit, Miss Pam and Izzy, that were actually boat strike turtles when they were very young, and after they were picked up and received critical care, they needed a forever home. And Wonders of Wildlife was able to welcome those two turtles here where they can inspire our guests to become champions for conservation.

People want to learn more about us, they can go to our website wondersofwildlife.org.

We've certainly enjoyed our visit here. And if you want to learn more about Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, just go to wildkingdom.com.