The Blue Machine

this gentle giant weeps as she eats. A huge proportion of her head is taken up with salt glands, organs that remove salt and push it out of her tear ducts. Leatherback tears are thick and viscous and almost twice as salty as the ocean. To keep eating without killing herself with salt, 34 the turtle must cry around eight litres of tears every hour. But this is the cost of living in seawater. As the turtle slowly sculls onwards, fading into the turquoise, her body is sorting the ocean, scrimping and saving the nutrients, rejecting the salt, and flushing through the water.