Racing Turtles

Just zoomin

I love that the turtle is explicitly bothering the cat, rather than just zooming aimlessly around.

"Mom it's not supposed to BE that fast!"

This just in: Turtle gains speed and immediately becomes a menace to local cat. "Why is he chasing me? Why not explore the house?" Cat comments. More on this in the evening.

through.the.lleaves on ig

The tortoise investigation committee

Good turt

Terrific turtle times

I realize the competition is fierce but I don’t think turtles/tortoises get enough consideration as contenders for the cutest babies in the animal kingdom

just look at them

I think I can confidently speak for all of us when I say we were all expecting a cat.

he was in the fridge!!!

ovbiously this person has done so much research and cares about their tortoise so much but…. the mf idea of having a live tortoise in a TUPPERWARE?! IN MY FRIDGE?? WITH ME FOOD? ahahahaha

the concept of opening someone else’s fridge only to find a WHOLE ASS TORTOISE in there… idk if I’d ever recover

@esperantoauthor when the food doesn’t come to Tesla, Tesla comes to the food

Reminds me of when I accidentally stumbled across this photo for the first time…

mutuals put me in your fridge

Back in 2015, I went over to a classmate’s house for group project work late in the fall, and in the middle of working on the presentation, offered to grab sodas for people but they were out of pepsi and Andrew whose house we were at said “Oh, there’s more in the basement fridge.”

So I go down to the basement, which is well-lit and finished and indeed there are more pepsi but also in the fridge is a massive tortise. This animal was the dimensions of a desktop computer and probably outweighed a labrador. It’s not moving, and is set in the middle of a plastic tray so it’s apparently supposed to be there. I go back upstairs.

“Hey Andrew.” I say, nonchalantly. “So is the tortise in the fridge down there for soup or what?”

“The what?” says the other member of the group project. I don’t remember her name, just that she always wore her hair in pigtails with butterfly clips that were based on real butterflies and she had at least a dozen species.

“Oh! No, that’s Andrew Too.” he says. “His species hibernates so he stays in the fridge for the holidays.”

“You named your tortise after you?” I ask.

“No, uh- Well, my grandfather got him in Egypt or somewhere while he was on leave during the war and He was named Andrew, so he thought it would be funny to name him ‘Andrew Too’. …Then Mom named me after him so Gandpa left me Andrew Too in his will. He’s pretty cool when he’s awake. Lets us dress him up for summer holidays, doesn’t bark.”

“Oh!” Said Butterflies. “My dad served in the Gulf War too! What unit was he in?”

“Oh no, Grandpa was with the Royal Air Force in World War Two. Andrew Too is going to be 70 this year! We’re going to make him a carrot cake!”

“is that for soup?”

“No, that’s my uncle”

so theres that thing about how octopodes are intelligent but only live like 3 years so any uplift would have to figure out how to lengthen their lifespan by like 10 times at least but its interesting to me how common the opposite is, animals which are super dumb but live for ages. like tortoises. its weird right. i mean obviously there are benefits to an extended lifespan other than acquiring knowledge, its mostly just more chances to reproduce

i mean it just depends. On. What happens to them. Like median human lifespan was 40 ish for most of history right? So genetic variants that cause a problem after 40 have half the selection pressure against them, compared to variants that cause a problem before 40. (actually less than half but you get the idea i think). To me tortoises make perfect sense from this perspective. They're long-lived because they have a shell and are hard to kill. There's more selection pressure against variants that cause problems in old age, because there's more of them actually making it to old age. And reproducing, yeah. So it's just more changes to reproduce.

HOWEVER you would think that like... variants that improve learning... would be selected for more strongly in longer-lived animals? Because there's more chances to use the knowledge? So yeah it's also kind of weird to stay dumb the whole time

holy shit octopuses have like 50 times as many neurons as tortoises

Idk I don’t think being an animal is THAT hard to learn? I don’t think a smart animal has that much of a survival advantage over one just getting by. Like—they pretty much have it covered just being smart enough to be embodied and remember where things are, predator evasion is usually reflex or habitat-based (or immunological—resisting parasite burden better than burdened conspecifics who get eaten instead). Like what earthly good would four or five times the brainpower do a tortoise? What would it help a creature shaped like that to obtain, or evade?

Most animals are pretty good solutions to their environment’s problems just from being in and using their bodies… we don’t have too many puzzle dungeon environments where your decisions (and spending calories thinking about them) super matter I think. As in, situations in which a smart one would do much of anything different from a dumb one.

If you look at where “intelligence” actl develops in the animal kingdom, it’s almost always directly related to lifeways.

Like: look at primates. Primates are “intelligence” because they’re social creatures that have to navigate a social environment filled with unique individuals(unlike, say, ants which are 1)clones and 2)seem to just follow pheromones around[Im not knowledgeable in ants tho, so maybe Im super-wrong about this]), and they HAVE the sort of “intelligence” that would require(ie: communicating about problems, properly identifying problems, and solving problems to increase group success). They’re ALSO arboreal, which requires nimble and multivalent limbs and the brain to USE such limbs, which creates the possibility for easy tool-use, which eventually(over a VERY LONG TIME) led via selection to increasingly complex tool-use(also: very powerful eyes and the pattern recognition to pick out Stuff in a camouflage-friendly environment but I wont get into that aspect of this).

Or take octopuses. They eat lots of Animals with shells, so they need to be able to get animals OUT of shells, but they have a mostly soft body which makes Smashing shells difficult, so Getting Good at Deshelling animals with The Power of Mental Thinking was available for selection to pressure. Thus good puzzle-solvers, But: their size and environment isn’t terribly conducive to large societies so, despite being obvsl very smart, and also capable of communication, that communication tends to be hostile. It may be that many species of Octopus, due to their way of life, conceive of communication as fundamentally hostile(similar to how most human communication obvsl seems to cats, tho they seem to be able to figure out that humans are Just Rude Like That and Dont Really Mean Anything By It, so maybe there’s room for hope with octos, too :>)

So Yeah, like mbl says, a tortoise is “unintelligent” because a tortoise doesn’t NEED to be “intelligent” by Human standards, but by tortoise ones. It has precisely the brain it needs to be good at tortoising, and that’s all that matters to evolution.

he was in the fridge!!!

ovbiously this person has done so much research and cares about their tortoise so much but.... the mf idea of having a live tortoise in a TUPPERWARE?! IN MY FRIDGE?? WITH ME FOOD? ahahahaha

the concept of opening someone else’s fridge only to find a WHOLE ASS TORTOISE in there... idk if I’d ever recover

@esperantoauthor when the food doesn’t come to Tesla, Tesla comes to the food

Reminds me of when I accidentally stumbled across this photo for the first time...

mutuals put me in your fridge

Back in 2015, I went over to a classmate's house for group project work late in the fall, and in the middle of working on the presentation, offered to grab sodas for people but they were out of pepsi and Andrew whose house we were at said "Oh, there's more in the basement fridge."

So I go down to the basement, which is well-lit and finished and indeed there are more pepsi but also in the fridge is a massive tortise. This animal was the dimensions of a desktop computer and probably outweighed a labrador. It's not moving, and is set in the middle of a plastic tray so it's apparently supposed to be there. I go back upstairs.

"Hey Andrew." I say, nonchalantly. "So is the tortise in the fridge down there for soup or what?"

"The what?" says the other member of the group project. I don't remember her name, just that she always wore her hair in pigtails with butterfly clips that were based on real butterflies and she had at least a dozen species.

"Oh! No, that's Andrew Too." he says. "His species hibernates so he stays in the fridge for the holidays."

"You named your tortise after you?" I ask.

"No, uh- Well, my grandfather got him in Egypt or somewhere while he was on leave during the war and He was named Andrew, so he thought it would be funny to name him 'Andrew Too'. ...Then Mom named me after him so Gandpa left me Andrew Too in his will. He's pretty cool when he's awake. Lets us dress him up for summer holidays, doesn't bark."

"Oh!" Said Butterflies. "My dad served in the Gulf War too! What unit was he in?"

"Oh no, Grandpa was with the Royal Air Force in World War Two. Andrew Too is going to be 70 this year! We're going to make him a carrot cake!"

Toucan: “that there just ain’t natural”

“We recently gave our tortoise (the biggest) to a friend. She had a couple others and we thought it would be a better environment for him. She sent this video to us today. The three of them are now the best pals, and always walk around like this. <3”

(Source)

One of the oldest attempts at environmental legislation, taken from Archie Carr’s “So Excellent a Fishe”.

In 2004, this giant Aldabra tortoise (Aldabrachelys gigantea) seems to have survived an ocean voyage from Atoll island of Aldabra to the east coast of Africa. That’s more than 740 km! The barnacles size suggests its trip took 6-7 weeks!

Despite the tortoise size, the trans-oceanic dispersal is supposed to be the mechanism where tortoises, and many other animals settle on islands around the world. This is the first direct evidence of a tortoise surviving a oceanic trip. 

- Another record of a giant Aldabra tortoise off Alphonse Island, The Seychelles, December 2005. Photograph by J. Gerlach

Researchers believe that after torrential winds and hurricanes, tortoises are transported to the sea, left to its lucky. This is the classic model of oceanic island colonization. It is ironic that the first documented trans-oceanic movement of a tortoise occurred from an island to a continent, rather than the reverse direction that is so importantto island biogeography

who wants to learn about turtle evolution

ME ALWAYS

they shell made of they ribs

ribbles expanded over many million of years

this is eunotosaurus he is like turtle great great gr8 gr8 gr8 grandpa

him ribs big.  then l8er u got later on there this dude who got big ribs 2

him name pappochelys we just found him

then those red things (they called gastralia) got real big n it make a plastron n u got the odontochelys

they got hard bellies n big ribs but shell doesn’t come for millions of years but then u got shell n u got proganochelys

he live with dinos he so lucky

shell happens to baby turtle because carapacial ridge goes over their shoulders instead of under wow

here is diagram of human and tortle skeleton after tortle has enslaved human and make him walk like dog for amusement

turtles might be cousins to either lepidosaurs (sneks, lizrds n tuatara) or archosaurs (crocs n birbs) but probably archosaurs turtles are probably related to birbs which is cool

good jobs turtles ur so weird nice

@fynneyseas

#beautiful post   #fav  #i dont care if it might bemisinfo  

i have a literal degree in zoology and my final capstone thesis was on turtle evolution and phylogeny so this isn’t misinfo buddy buster brown @vulpiximisa fear not

I read this post twice and realized that it is actually the perfect form of science communication for Tumblr. There is nothing factually inaccurate here, despite what you would usually expect of posts with similar syntax. Bless you.