Excerpt One of Fit for Survival, from Laundry Lines, A Memoir in Stories and Poems

The leatherback sea turtle is a species virtually unchanged since they began swimming the world's oceans 110 million years ago in the time of the dinosaurs. Embodiment of the mysteries of survival and a cultural icon, they navigate the seas across thousands of kilometres of entire ocean basins, dive as deep as 4,200 feet (1,280 metres) for food, and can stay down for up to 85 minutes. The leatherback is so different from other marine turtle species that it is a taxonomic family of its own, called Dermochelyidae. The only remaining member of their original family, they are now critically endangered.

These wonderful creatures have survived for millennia because of a uniquely heavy, but leathery and flexible, inky-blue carapace that is ridged along the back, which protects them as well as giving them a more hydrodynamic structure. Leatherbacks have a very strong sense of smell and sight that can detect an enemy from a distance, and they can use claws against attack.

They propel themselves forwards with their front flippers in a swimming-like motion averaging close to 2.5 km per hour as they traverse the longest migration pattern between breeding and feeding areas of any sea turtle, averaging 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometres) each way. Through an unusual set of adaptations they can maintain warm body temperatures in cold water and travel in tropical and temperate waters. But their transoceanic routes through Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans and the Mediterranean Sea, as far north as Canada and Norway, and as far south as New Zealand and South America, are largely unknown. And where the hatchlings feed in the deep ocean is still a mystery.