Turtle City

The other day, I was rummaging in my daughter’s toy chest and found her turtle puppet. “Look,” I told her, “Your turtle puppet!”

She wrinkled her nose, slapped a hand on her four-year-old hip, and informed me, “It’s not a turtle, Mommy, it’s a leatherback sea turtle.”

Well then! At least they had someone sticking up for them, eh?

It turns out that we, too, can stick up for the leatherback sea turtle today—albeit in a slightly less bossy manner. Read more

I'm catching up on my Hulu queue this week, after a big lag over the holidays, so it wasn't until this morning that I saw Charles Moore as Stephen Colbert's interview guest.  Captain Moore is the one who first discovered and identified the Pacific Garbage Patch in the North Pacific Gyre while sailing back to Los Angeles from Hawaii.
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I enjoy watching MonsterQuest, but it tends to irritate me.  My feelings towards the show were handily summed up by a quote from the latest episode I watched.  "If ____ happens, the results would be frightening."  Well, sure!  And if crocodiles learned to drive cars, the results would be frightening, too.  What's your point?

The point of their episode "Killer Jellyfish" is that if jellyfish take over the ocean, the results would be frightening.  (Except for some of the clips from night diving in Australia, the point of which was "if these sharks were hungrier, the results would be frightening."  I mean honestly, sharks have it hard enough without the narrator throwing around terms like "feeding frenzy" to describe sharks swimming around peacefully, over a suite of horror movie music, don't you think?)
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Researchers from the University of Exeter in the UK are not only tracking two leather back turtles, now you two can follow them from a special Website that displays the current position of the turtles. Read more

It’s no secret that we’re big turtle fans in these parts. If you love the shelled creatures, had a mutant turtle as a hero at some point in your life, and don’t like seeing them killed, I hope you’ll decide to take action for them with this information.

It’s a sad but true fact that sea turtles are dying out—because of us. Both loggerhead sea turtles—who live in the Atlantic Ocean—and the Pacific Ocean’s leatherback sea turtles are listed as threatened or endangered by the Endangered Species Act. Even with this listing, they remain mostly unprotected; every year their numbers dwindle down further and further. Read more

They say that future serial killers often kill animals as children. After hearing a rumor about George W. Bush blowing up frogs as a child, I figured that maybe plain old idiots do, too.

Perhaps it’s just a case of “boys will be boys”? Equally bad, if not worse things—rape, assault, etc.—have all been attributed to the old folksy saying. And while I’ve had trouble with the saying my entire life, many people chalk it up to normal male behavior.

After inquiring after my husband if he blew up animals as a child, as well as several other male acquaintances, I determined that the answer to the question is decidedly no. So what is it that makes people, say, blow up a turtle? Read more

As a child, I often kept box turtles as pets. We lived in my grandmother’s basement for a time, so it seemed a perfect place to let turtles roam around in. My dad, a carpenter, would build them “apartments” and things to play in, and I’d like to think they were relatively happy.

That said, today we know that box turtles are a threatened species. Though habitat destruction and global warming are cited as key reasons why, a primary factor is the actual capture of box turtles in commercial trade. With a low reproduction rate and as many as 30,000 turtles being captured and sold in less than a four-year time frame, even laws against capturing the turtles don’t help much. Read more

I never really understood the desire to eat turtles. I get that chicken and pigs and cows are raised as food, and while it’s usually not humane, it’s something that everyone’s familiar with.

Kids are taught “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” before they can read and write, after all, and while the whole smiling family farmer in the dell and the happy cows and all of the other BS is usually—well, BS—these days in light of the factory farms that riddle the country, at least people know that the food comes from living creatures, and that they’re specifically bred for it. Read more

Amazingly, a 90-year-old, 198-pound giant tortoise—the last of his own kind—may soon be a father. In his pen at the Galapagos Islands, “Lonesome George” was discovered with some very unexpected company on Monday—five unhatched eggs in perfect condition.

This news is incredibly exciting, as no known Pinta island tortoises have reproduced in decades, and despite much encouragement from his keepers since 1993, George hasn’t expressed an interested in mating—that is, apparently, until now.

Also amazing is that George is considered to be in his “sexual prime.” Though I knew turtles grew to be very old, even older than humans—anyone who’s seen Finding Nemo knows that, right?—I had no idea that 90 was considered to be a good age for reproduction. Read more

Have you ever wondered just what makes up a turtle shell? I know when I was a kid, I thought it grew right out of its back and around its body, because the turtle shell that my dad found in the woods and gave to me still had a backbone in it, attached.

 It turns out that I was pretty close.

Japanese scientists at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan have discovered that turtle shells are actually made from their own shoulder blades and rib bones. According to the study, published in Science journal, while in the egg, the shell completes a strange but cool folding process that pushes the turtle’s shoulder blades straight into its own ribcage, which makes the ribs grow around them, creating the shell. Read more