I was contemplating turtles one night. How do they live? How do they reproduce? What do they eat? Well, that last one is easy to answer. I know lots of people who had pet turtles as kids. You’re supposed to feed them raw hamburger. So I guess they eat beef.
Turtles eat beef. How did they evolve to eat that? I guess they must have evolved from the prarie turtles of the American Great Plains. Ah yes, one has visions of the great predatory turtles of the primitive Americas, stalking their prey, the vicious cow. The Great Plains turtle would hide in wait for the unsuspecting heifer, then give chase across the grasslands, taking the frightened beast down. The turtle would leave nothing but the carcass, to be picked clean by vulture turtles.
They are close relatives of the mountain turtle of the Himalayas. Or the dread cactus turtles of the desert.
But none is more vicious than the dreaded jungle turtle. They lie in wait in treetops, waiting for their prey to pass underneath. They then drop off the tree, shell first, in an attempt to stun their prey by conking it on the head. But sometimes the prey is not killed with just one blow. No, the dreaded jungle turtle must attempt to strike again. While the prey attempts to swiftly flee, the turtle climbs the tree and drops again. Sometimes it takes 4 or 5 attempts before the shelled predator subdues its next meal.
I have a turtle, it’s a red-eared slider and he’s sooooo cute. He eats lettuce in addition to his pellets, and would try to take a bite out of things 20x his size.
Our cats would subsist entirely on a diet of ham if we let them. This conjures up images of a pack of house cats conspiring to bruing down a pig. I can’t picture it, not even when I shift it slightly to a pack of African wild cats. How did cats end up so addicted to ham?
Did you know that flying turtles can’t actually fly? They have a flap of skin that can be stretched between their shell and legs that, approximating the shape of a wing, does allow them at best to glide. They do, however, steer via short bursts from their multi-directional, prehensile turtle rectum.
We had a similar thought process with our African Grey…seeing as how it likes food it could never possibly get in the wild (visions of a flock of African Grey’s taking down a waterbuffalo came to mind.)
I had a couple of Red Eared sliders in College. They’re pretty much good for turning food into turtle crap. Not a whole lotta love there. Course it WAS funny when one of them bit a roommate, who said “Hey, that didn’t hurt bad at all” leading to the OTHER roommate duplicating the science experiment. Seigfried was READY the second time.
That and people couldn’t stand ‘guppy nights’ and yet, they couldn’t turn away from the carnage either.
When I was a kid, my dentist used to give out those little tiny turtles. That was before they discovered that you could get salmonella from handling them.
I think Sea Turtles have the sweetest most benign faces in the animal world. Unlike the Aligator Snapping Turtle, which are hideously scary looking.
As a kid, I “rescued” a Western Painted Turtle from a riverbank near the house.
Charlie was a wonderful turtle, spending the summer in a converted litter box. We played ball together, ate PB & J’s, talked about girls. Just the greatest pal a 7 year old could have. Winter was coming, and mom said Charlie had to spend it outside like turtles do.
So I read up in my encyclopedia and it said that turtles survived the winter by burrowing into the mud. I thoughtfully pile some extra soil into Charlie’s box, got it all wet for him and left him outside to burrow and hibernate.
That was the spring day I discovered my mom to be the cold-hearted turtle murderer I now know her to be, when I discovered Charlie’s partially decomposed remnants half buried in frozen mud.
The Aligator Snapping Turtle is so nasty, it can live in the same tank as a bunch of actual alligators.
Of course, in the wild, it conceals itself in a suitably large body of water and waits, perfectly still save for its tongue. The tongue of the aligator snapping turtle has evolved to perfectly resemble the food of its prey, the Florida Redneck. The Redneck sees a fresh, unopened pouch of pork rinds, floating just below the surface. The redneck attempts to pick up the snack food, and the turtle clamps its jaws shut.
The Aligator Snapping Turtle may be in danger. More and more retired Jews have moved to Florida in the past decades. Due to changes in the economy, young, breeding Jews have begun to move to Florida. They are already displacing the Redneck population in some areas. The turtle’s lure is ineffective on them as they don’t eat pork, and would never eat something they found in a pond. Scientists are divided on the best way to preserve the turtle. A vocal minority claim that the turtle will evolve a new lure- perhaps a winning group of mah jongg tiles, or a small, gaudy statuette suitable for bookshelves and mantles.
But, this situation bears watching. I remind you all of the Ceropin. This species secreted a substance like spermaceti oil. It used this to keep its shell extremely bright and shiny. During daylight, no predator could even safely look at a Ceropin. In fact, to eagles and many other predators, the bright shell was an effective form of Yehudi camouflage, rendering the Ceropin invisible to them.
Then, things changed. Automobiles were big business. Blinded by short term profits, the founder of Turtle Wax had his men hunt the species to extinction in just a few decades. The company successfully changed to a new formula, and swept things under the rug.
The Gonowhangee, may or may not be extinct. The ancestors of this species developed collapsible membranes to allow the sun to quickly heat their bodies in the morning, and to gather condensed moisture at sunset. While still capable of being collapsed and stored insided the shell, the membrane evolved to great size. Gliding was inevitable. The Gonowhangee was never capable of true flight. But it could maneuver on thermals and glide for miles. The Aborigines never really hunted the Gonowhangee, too much effort for not a lot of meat. Occasionally, a medicine man would kill one for a ritual.
Then, the English came. For profit, for sport, for no good reason at all Gonowhangees were shot out of the sky. There are no known survivors. But, there have been reports of the distinctive flying turtle. There may be a breeding population hidden somewhere in the outback.
