In Es Shop’s Fairy Tale the Turtle and The Hair, we learned that complacency is a dangerous thing because “slowly and steadily one wins the competition.” However, the new video footage conveyed the same message but with a somewhat grim ending. Illustrated by Seychelles researchers, the video shows a puppy becoming a little casual near a tortoise.
Following in the footsteps of the fictional rabbit, the chicken’s complacency for not escaping ultimately proves their death as turtles – surprising everyone – killing and eating the chicken. Rather, casual killing has become the focus of a letter published in the journal Current Biology where researchers who have witnessed it speculate that it may not have been the first bird to die in a tortoise’s lap, and probably never will.
In the video, we see an adult female tortoise showing a special interest in a turn chicken that gets stuck on a log. Even at this early stage, the tortoise’s behavior makes it clear that something is about to go downhill – unfortunately, the turn chicken didn’t take it. “It was looking straight at the turn and purposefully walking towards it. It was very, very strange and completely different from the behavior of ordinary turtles,” said author Justin Gerlach, director of biology studies at Peterhouse College, Cambridge University, in a press release. Within the next seven minutes, the tortoise takes time to search for the baby and just as it is within the distance of the stage it opens its mouth and extends its neck.
Something is being found, the baby tries to defend himself by picking up the tortoise but gets stuck nowhere at the end of the log, his head ends up very smoky in the jaws of the bloody tortoise. Not a sentence I thought I would write this week. The chick is good and really dead, falls to the floor where the tortoise works quickly to swallow its carcass whole. It’s a way to destroy evidence, I guess.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Gerlach said. “It was horrible and amazing at the same time.” Turtle-eating remains and meat is not heard, but so far, Gerlach has explained, no one has been able to figure out if such food really stumbled across the turtles or if they played a role in the victim’s death. Although the video proves, they are not able to carry others, though young, animals.
