Big Leatherback Turtle – Narre Warren

The Games programme produced a set of large aquatic creatures that were dispersed afterwards, and this catalogue has now traced several: the dolphin fish at Tooradin, the big-eyed scad at Edenhope, the Koran angelfish at Pyramid Hill and this. Tracking where they all went is a genuinely interesting exercise, and the fact that somebody maintains a register of them is fortunate.

Putting the turtle at a swimming pool is the most sensible destination of the four. A marine reptile at an aquatic centre has an obvious logic that a scad in the Wimmera does not.

The leatherback deserves the scale. It is by a wide margin the largest turtle on earth, reaching over two metres and several hundred kilograms, with a leathery ridged shell rather than a hard one – and it undertakes some of the longest migrations of any animal, crossing entire oceans between nesting beaches and feeding grounds. It is also critically endangered in several populations.

Casey ARC is a large municipal aquatic and recreation centre in Melbourne's outer south-east, so the turtle is met by swimmers rather than tourists.

Neither the sources nor the catalogue give its size.