![]() It’s a bit of free extra protein, so eating carrion is expected. “Pretty much any herbivore will eat a bit of meat if it comes across it. “Eating other animals was not surprising,” Dr Gerlach told The Telegraph. The recording from Ms Zora shattered both these assumptions. He also said that previously there had been anecdotal reports of tortoises crushing and eating other animals but no hard evidence. The whole event took seven “horrifying” minutes, Dr Gerlach said, with the actual pursuit and killing taking 92 seconds.ĭr Gerlach said that, in nature, even the most dedicated herbivore will eat meat if it stumbles across an already dead animal. The tortoise then climbed down from the log, picked up the carcass and swallowed it whole. The tortoise’s next attack landed, its jaws clamping around the head of the bird and killing it instantly. It opted for the latter – and the consequences were fatal. ![]() ![]() “The chick tried to defend itself by pecking at the tortoise without making contact and fluttering its wings.”īut as the bird reached the end of the log and ran out of space, it was faced with a decision – ignore its hardwired fear of the forest floor, hop off the log and run away from the current threat or stay on the log and take its chances with the tortoise. “The chick retreated along the log and was pursued by the tortoise, which continued to attempt to bite,” the researchers wrote in their paper, published in the journal Current Biology. The large reptile approached with its mouth open and tongue retracted – a classic sign of tortoise aggression. ![]() The 1.5ft-long female giant tortoise had seen the chick on a log and made a beeline for it at walking pace. Ms Zora saw the event unfold before her after she was returning home at about 5pm from a day of counting the island’s tern population last July. The bird, a tern, was too young to fly and was scared of leaving the log and hopping on to the ground because it would have been likely to have been eaten by a lizard or crab. His colleague Anna Zora caught on camera the first direct evidence of a tortoise hunting when she stumbled across an adult female in pursuit of a chick that had fallen out of its nest and was standing on a log. Few animals have a less intimidating public image than the tortoise, best known for its vegetarian diet, slow pace of life and ability to live for more than 100 years.īut a new study has found that they are also hunters who will kill and eat other animals if given the perfect opportunity – but their lack of speed and weapons mean they are one of the least efficient predators on the planet.ĭr Justin Gerlach, a researcher at the University of Cambridge’s museum of zoology, was involved in a conservation project on Fregate, a private island in the Seychelles. ![]()
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