> In July 2023 there was a fight between David and Fredrik which resulted in Fredrik being turned onto his back and left to die, in an area where his plight would not have been visible from the house or the tortoise viewing area. Fortunately he was spotted in time by visiting vet Joe Hollins, who turned Fredrik the right way up with no long-lasting ill effects. This is apparently not the first time recently when a tortoise has been turned over, though in the other occasion it was David who finished the wrong way up, not after a fight but after an unsuccessful attempt to mount Emma for mating purposes…
His companions. Never thought tortoises have such a wild life.
Life would be so much more magical and special if attempting to penetrate your mate could result in a slow death of dehydration and starvation, if not being torn to shreds by a passing bird of prey.
Shouldn't it be easy to attach a sensor at the belly of the turtle that alarms staff when it happens. Sounds like an actual no-brainer use for modern technology.
That would probably really piss the tortoise off. Imagine if your ass was made out of bone, and someone glued a lego to it. Sitting down would be a nightmare.
The story goes that while the Americans spent billions putting thrusters on their tortoises, the Russians simply duct-taped ordinary pencils on the their tortoises, making them unflippable.
I raised market-sheep when I was younger and during breeding the ram wears a harness with colored chalk on the underside. You then have visual cues for which ewes are likely to become pregnant.
How did these animals survive as a species for millions of years with this flip-over bug in their genes? Why hasn't evolution solved it, for example, by eliminating flip-prone individuals from the gene pool and giving better survival chances to those who can right themselves?
You're assuming natural selection selects for not flipping over, when in reality, it selects for the winner of the shell flipping contest as presumably without intervention, the flipped tortoise does not breed, while the winning tortoise does (or at least still has the opportunity to)
> How did these animals survive as a species for millions of years with this flip-over bug in their genes?
Whether or not they can right themselves depends upon the terrain. Falling over can be a fatal experience for humans too.
> Why hasn't evolution solved it, for example, by eliminating flip-prone individuals from the gene pool and giving better survival chances to those who can right themselves?
Evolution is all about trade-offs. Being big makes it hard to right yourself, but it also makes you much harder to flip. It probably also probably makes you much hotter to potential mates.
St Helena has "recently" (inside last decade) got an airport and a weekly service from Johannesburg, South Africa via Walvis Bay, Namibia.
Before that it was only accessible via an infrequent ship which took 3 days out of Cape Town, South Africa.
But given the air link it is a lot more accessible now.
Tristan is still only accessible via sea, and even if you make it there, there's no guarantee you can land. There is no port, so ship-to-land transfers are via small boat, so the whole process is very weather dependent.
Both islands though have a really interesting history, and are well worth reading about, even if you never get there.
My father was the dentist on St Helena from 1998-2022. I visited, taking a military jet from Brize Norton airbase in the UK to Ascension Island, and then a 3-day boat on the RMS St Helena. I never took the 5-day boat from South Africa. It's a hilly and rugged place, and very green. I was a student when I went there, and I was with my twin brother and we met another set of twins who were visiting at the same time. They were our age and we all got pissed and shared the cheap cigs. My bro and one of them climbed Jacob's Ladder late at night after many beers, and they took ages while we waited at the top. They kept having to stop to vomit. That was an excellent Christmas and new year.
I can't find the originals (flagged out of Algolia?) but this story was interesting.. slight tangent Oldest known tortoise still alive, as reports of death revealed as hoax (6 points, 7 months ago - but there's healthy discussion somewhere, think the original news was 2026-04-01) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47620163
Tangentially related gripe: Cloudflare has ruined the internet. I can't even read an article about a turtle using a US VPN with US IPs without solving 2 captchas. I assume some uptick is the amount of scraping labs are doing as well as a plethora of tools and bots made with AI, but it is extremely annoying how consolidated players dictate what is possible on the internet and there is no escape from surveillance capitalism. These little bits of friction add up.
Edit: I was using the VPN. The turtle was not using the VPN
Cloudflare has no part in this beyond providing the technology. There are various alternative "security check" pages that are used by others; cloudflare's is the best of the bunch IMO, though still annoying.
This page isn't cloudflare's, cloudflare stopped using google's captcha some years ago. It says ray id at the bottom, idk what's up with that, but it's clearly different.
I got banned on cloudflare yesterday for refreshing the a page too many times during a failed "human check" and am still bitter about it. You are 100% correct though, this isn't cloudflare. I still stand by the point though. Having massive consolidation in the space is dangerous.
50,000 tokens later (amounting to $74 in actual inference costs after IPOs in '27) and we can finally open a webpage that looks like it was designed in the 90's and using SingleFile plugin weighs in at 410KB. Another successful day browsing the World Wide Web.
Can someone copy/pasta the article here? The reCAPTCHA is too annoying. It's not worth my effort. The Cloudflare one is better -- it never asks you to select photos. Just one button click.
>A NOTE ON GENDER: just in case anyone complains, on this page we refer to Jonathan as ‘he/him’. He is certainly a biological male and nobody we know speaks Tortoise so we cannot ask how he identifies, so have defaulted to using is biological gender.
His companions. Never thought tortoises have such a wild life.
https://sainthelenaisland.info/jonathan.htm
Whether or not they can right themselves depends upon the terrain. Falling over can be a fatal experience for humans too.
> Why hasn't evolution solved it, for example, by eliminating flip-prone individuals from the gene pool and giving better survival chances to those who can right themselves?
Evolution is all about trade-offs. Being big makes it hard to right yourself, but it also makes you much harder to flip. It probably also probably makes you much hotter to potential mates.
Before that it was only accessible via an infrequent ship which took 3 days out of Cape Town, South Africa.
But given the air link it is a lot more accessible now.
Tristan is still only accessible via sea, and even if you make it there, there's no guarantee you can land. There is no port, so ship-to-land transfers are via small boat, so the whole process is very weather dependent.
Both islands though have a really interesting history, and are well worth reading about, even if you never get there.
And these days you can get a flavor of local life via the local newspaper online. https://sthelenaonline.org/st-helena-independent/
If only you'd shared some cheap fags, too - guaranteed more reaction than even the epstein files would ever get.
'Jonathan' is the oldest land animal on Earth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49998066 - Oct 2026 (164 comments)
Jonathan the 190-Year-Old Tortoise Was Photographed in 1886 and Today - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30099606 - Jan 2022 (77 comments)
Edit: I was using the VPN. The turtle was not using the VPN
This page isn't cloudflare's, cloudflare stopped using google's captcha some years ago. It says ray id at the bottom, idk what's up with that, but it's clearly different.
I do look forward to 90s websites though.
I have no idea why no one bought it