TURTLE TALES

Some random facts and stories about our favorite reptile.

 

LEGO TURTLE

In 2018 an eastern box turtle was taken to the Maryland Zoo with multiple fractures on its plastron (the bottom of the shell). Veterinarians used surgical wire to attach small metal plates to keep the shell together, but the turtle couldn’t walk, and there’s no “turtle wheelchair” they could order online. A friend of one of the vets happened to be a Lego aficionado, so a few weeks later, “The turtle received his very own multicolored Lego brick wheelchair,” said zoo vet Garrett Fraess. “The small Lego frame surrounds his shell and sits on four Lego wheels. Plumbers-putty attaches the device to the edges of the turtle’s upper shell, which gets him off of the ground and allows his legs to be freed up so he can move.” The box turtle really took to his new wheels. The vets are hoping that he’ll walk on his own again one day.

 

ALIEN TURTLE

On a nighttime dive off the Solomon Islands in 2015, a marine biologist named David Gruber was filming the neon colors of biofluorescent coral reefs when, “Out of the blue, what almost looked like a bright red and green spaceship swam underneath my camera!” The “spaceship” turned out to be a hawksbill sea turtle, and Gruber’s light beam made the patterns on its shell and head glow like a psychedelic black light poster. Because this phenomenon can only be seen at night under a special type of light, no one had ever witnessed it in sea turtles before. And while there are several other plants and animals that exhibit biofluorescence, like coral and eels, this is the first biofluorescent reptile ever witnessed. Gruber says it’s unclear why these turtles fluoresce; it could be to blend in with the coral, or to put on an impressive display for a potential mate. More study is required. Meanwhile, the critically endangered hawksbill only stayed with the divers for a few minutes. “It’s like he came and divulged his secret,” said Gruber. And then he swam away.

 

BORED TURTLE

How’s this for excitement? A British biologist named Anna Wilkinson studied red-footed tortoises to see if their yawns are contagious. But first, she had to teach a tortoise named Alexandra how to yawn. “We presented her with a red stimulus (a small square piece of paper) and rewarded her whenever she opened her mouth while the stimulus was present,” said Wilkinson. “After she learned this we started to reward her only when she opened it slightly wider and so on. Once she was opening her mouth the appropriate amount we then only rewarded her when she also tipped her head back. It took a long time!” Roughly six months, it turns out. Once her team got the tortoise to yawn on command, they wanted to find out if other tortoises would mimic that behavior. If so, it could help shed light on whether contagious human yawns are due to a physiological mechanism or merely a social response. So how did the turtles do? Not well. “The red-footed tortoise does not yawn in response to observing a conspecific yawn. This suggests that contagious yawning is not the result of a fixed action pattern but may involve more complex social processes.” (In another study, Wilkinson taught her tortoise Moses how to navigate a maze faster than lab rats.)

Hot water pours at a higher pitch than cold water does.

 

HANDSY TURTLES

Neither mutants nor ninjas, some sea turtles have been observed using their front flippers to “karate-chop” prey. It was long assumed that sea turtles’ flipperlike front legs are only used for swimming and digging. Researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California now say that sea turtles are quite dexterous. They can use their flippers to hold a slippery jellyfish for easier eating, to grasp onto delicate reefs while sucking out sponges, to roll scallops across the ocean floor, and to chop a jellyfish right down the middle. They even “lick their fingers” after eating. The big takeaway from the study is that the sea turtle is a lot smarter than previously thought. Unlike the elephant’s agile trunk, sea turtle flippers haven’t evolved to be able to perform so many specific tasks. It’s the sea turtle’s brain that has become more advanced. “We expect these things to happen with a highly intelligent, adaptive social animal,” said lead researcher Kyle Van Houtan. “With sea turtles, it’s different. They never meet their parents; they’re never trained to forage by their mom.”

 

TURTLE RECALL

“Several years ago, a client brought me a box turtle that had been hit by a car,” said Shannon Moore, a veterinarian from Logan, Ohio. Her specialty is dogs and cats, and this turtle was in really bad shape. Unsure what else to do, she covered the shell with clear fiberglass. The turtle could walk, and seemed to be fine, so she let it go in the woods near her house. As time went by, however, Moore became more and more concerned about the turtle’s condition. She found out that box turtles need to periodically shed, and the fiberglass might prevent that from happening. But all she could do was hope it was okay.

More than two years went by. Then, while walking on a hillside near her house, Moore saw a familiar orange-and-yellow pattern in the grass. It was the same turtle, and it seemed to be doing just fine. “It filled me with joy,” she said.

Tsundoku is a Japanese word that means “to buy books but never read them.”