Posted on 08/23/2021 12:19:02 PM PDT by Red Badger
In what amounts to perhaps the most unhurried act of animal predation ever caught on camera, researchers have filmed for the first time a giant tortoise slowly – ever so slowly – closing in for the kill.
This drawn-out encounter – between a lumbering, almost leisurely giant tortoise (Aldabrachelys gigantea) and its grounded bird prey – is gruesome to watch. But it's also entirely transfixing.
After all, we've never seen a tortoise 'hunt' anything before. Who knew these dawdling giants had it in them?
VIDEO AT LINK......................
"I couldn't believe what I was seeing," says biologist Justin Gerlach from the University of Cambridge. "It was horrifying and amazing at the same time."
The footage, captured on Frégate Island in the Seychelles archipelago, shows a female giant tortoise slowly pursuing a flightless lesser noddy tern (Anous tenuirostris) chick.
In a new study describing the encounter – said to be the "first documented observation of a tortoise deliberately attacking and consuming another animal" – the researchers indicate the hunt lasted seven minutes in total, including a passage where the tortoise pursued the chick along the top of a log.
The video – captured by Anna Zora, deputy conservation and sustainability manager with the Frégate Island Foundation – lasts for only a fraction of that, but it's enough to unequivocally show a deliberate, calculated attack on the part of the tortoise.
"It was looking directly at the tern and walking purposefully toward it," says Gerlach. "This was very, very strange, and totally different from normal tortoise behavior."
While tortoises such as A. gigantea (aka the Aldabra giant tortoise) are primarily herbivorous, the researchers say there have been anecdotal reports of tortoises squashing crabs with their carapaces, or unfilmed reports of the primarily herbivorous animals eating birds or consuming carrion.
Nonetheless, prior studies have never surfaced any actual evidence of hunting.
"Previously it's always been impossible to tell if the tortoise had directly killed the animal, or if it had just happened to sit down on one and find it conveniently squashed dead," Gerlach says.
The new footage settles the question, and in harrowing fashion. Tortoises do hunt creatures, after all, make no mistake. It just takes them a while to close the deal, and the prey has to be a pretty easy catch.
What remains unknown is just how often this kind of thing occurs. According to the researchers, there are signs this might be a lot more common than we knew, at least among the tortoise population of Frégate Island.
"The direct approach to the chick on the log suggests that the tortoise had experience of being able to capture a chick in such a situation," the researchers write in their paper.
"This indicates that this type of interaction is not infrequent for this individual. The observation of other tortoises hunting and consuming birds suggests that this behavior has been adopted by several individuals."
Move over JAWS! ATTACK OF THE GIANT TORTOISE!................
Ping!............
Move over JAWS!........ ATTACK OF THE GIANT TORTOISE!................
Was this tortoise used in the intitial animal studies of covid vaccines?
Bird had all the time in the world to vamoose.
Could be a territorial thing too. Tortoises can be a little temperamental with other animals that eat it’s food.
It’s like how the Communists took over America.
perhaps the little bird was already injured.....I was rooting for him.
So this guy hears a knock at his door, opens it and sees this snail looking up at him. The guy flicks it off into the bushes and goes sits down. Four months later he hears this knock at his door, opens it and here’s this snail again, the snail looks up at him and says “What the heck was that all about?”
For the 1st, the crew brought along enough film...
WOW! Just WOW! I won’t be able to sleep tonight!!!!
The bird was smart enough to know this was not one of those
‘nice’ turtles, but he was too dumb to walk away.
The Bird had all the time in the world to get away.
Maybe he was teasing the turtle.
“Ha Ha, you can’t catch me, ya big Slow Poke!”
That was what I thought when I saw it.
Mitch McConnell pointed to the video and said;
“In essence, that Turtle was me going after the Senate!”
That’s a good one!
I had to let the idea ‘bake’ for a minute.
I would suggest the bird was already dead or wounded when the tortoise arrived on the scene.
Oh. An actual turtle. I was thinking Cocaine Mitch.
It’s not that slow.
Ping
America had all the time to get rid of Biden before he totally destroys the nation.
The 🐦 deserved to ☠
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