Incidência de fibropapilomatose em tartarugas marinhas na Bacia Potiguar RN/CE

Abstract

The five species of sea turtles that occur in the brazilian coast are classified as species at risk of extinction by global lists of threatened species. Such status is due to the different threats that these animals have suffered over the past decades, among them the destruction of natural habitat, fotopoluição, incidental fishing, vehicle traffic and predation of eggs. Another significant threat to these animals, described in the literature, is the occurrence of fibropapillomatosis. This disease affects sea turtles, especially juveniles of the species Chelonia mydas, although it was also described in other species. This work intends to investigate the spatial and temporal distribution of records of sea turtles with fibropapilamatose stranding, living or dead, from the beaches of the municipalities of Icapuí / CE by Caiçara do Norte / RN, and to characterize the histology of these lesions. For this daily monitoring were performed, using quads in order to record the occurrence of sea turtles in the Bacia Potiguar RN / CE of beaches. Dead animals, depending of the decomposition state, they were evaluated for the type, number and positioning of tumors, photographed and georeferenced. The live animals were rescued and translocated to the rehabilitation base of the project Cetáceos da Costa Branca / UERN-Areia Branca where we performed the count procedure and location of the tumors. For the development of the research are being used data collected between 2011 and 2015. Among the 3.960 stranded sea turtles, 680 had tumors caused by fibropapillomatosis, values which grew during the years studied. In relation to the variation between the monitored sectors, the highest frequency of animals affected by the disease was recorded in the sector “C” "Guamaré-Macau." As the development phase, most of the affected individuals were in the immature stage, but there were also adult animals record and subadult affected by the disease. The lesions are configured for presenting papillary projections and epidermal hyperplasia, hyperkeratinisation regions within the connective tissue and points with suggestive of inflammation erythrocyte clusters. In addition, we observed parasites and leech eggs present within tumor structure. The Bacia Potiguar RN / CE has been shown to be an excerpt with features shared by other areas of fibropapillomatosis occurrence and with factors that may have contributed to the increase of the records of affected animals. Because it is a debilitating disease, which affects mainly juvenile animals with etiology not yet well defined, fibropapillomatosis promotes research aimed at a better understanding of the disease for the conservation of sea turtle species.