ORLANDO, Fla. -- A Coast Guard plane touched down in Orlando at dusk Tuesday, hauling a cargo of the world's rarest sea turtles, rescued by volunteers from the lethally chilly waters and beaches of Cape Cod Bay. Weighing from 2 to 10 pounds, the young Kemp's Ridley sea turtles are among the first of an astounding wave of the reptiles to succumb to hypothermia in the "bucket" of the Massachusetts bay.

"They're so small," said Alyssa Hancock, a SeaWorld Orlando aquarium worker, peering into one of 101 banana boxes holding 193 turtles.

Turtle rescues happen every year in late fall in the Northeast, but for reasons not yet known what's happening this year is "epic," said one of the nearly two dozen volunteers passing boxes of turtles like a bucket brigade.

"Statistically, I feel like we are out on Pluto," said Tony LaCasse, spokesman for the New England Aquarium's marine-animal hospital in Quincy, Mass., who fears the number of cold-stunned turtles could quadruple.

"We've been rescuing sea turtles for 25 years, and we are just absolutely shocked," LaCasse said.

Among possible explanation for the huge spike in turtle rescues -- the record of 242 in 2012 has been eclipsed already this year by more than 400 rescues -- is that the number of highly endangered Kemp's ridleys has been increasing slightly in recent years.

So when more of them turned up to feast on crabs in Cape Cod Bay, more were trapped there when water temperatures began to drop in September.

The bay is shaped like a bucket, and turtles have to swim 25 miles to the north to get over the lip of the bucket and escape to warmer waters.

"They slowly get hypothermic over six to eight weeks," LaCasse said. "Their body temperature goes from about 70 at Labor Day to 60 Oct. 1 and near 50 by mid-November. What happens in November is we get big north winds and wave activity that washes them up on beaches of Outer Cape Cod."

Many of the rescues have been done by volunteers with the Massachusetts Audubon Sanctuary at Wellfleet Bay.

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193 rare sea turtles catch a flight to Florida