All the turtles

So, I said last week I haven't been doing much, and am trying to find myself something to do. Well, I did. After a lot of messages all over the place, I was answered from a group studying the turtles of Amazonia saying yeah, we can always find something to do with extra people. So I've spent some time hanging out with the turtle people.

Here, some pictures of some turtles.

So. We all know (or maybe we don't), that in English there are two words to describe the animals that in Finnish we simply call kilpikonna (or shield toad, if you don't speak Finnish and want a direct translation (well, to be exact toad is rupikonna in Finnish, in which the rupi translates to a scab, and the konna which is also in kilpikonna translates to a villain or a scoundrel. So I suppose technically kilpikonna translates to shield villain instead of shield toad, but I'm pretty sure the konna there refers to a toad, and not to what ever it originally refers to in the word for toad. Anyway. Moving on.))
So like I was saying, there are two words that refer to these animals in English. There are the turtles, which live in water, and the tortoises, which live on land, although according to wikipedia, at least in American English turtle can be used to refer to all of them collectively. In Portuguese, however, there are three words for these animals: there are the jabutis, which are terrestrial, the tartarugas, which are aquatic (marine or fresh water) and then there are the cádagos, which all live in fresh water and have long necks. And, according to wikipedia, legs with interdigital membranes and nails, but the turtle people at INPA only told me about the long necks. But yeah, they have a two different words for different kinds of turtles, and I'm unable to tell which group a turtle belongs to by looking at it.

So, what did I do at the turtle place?

I helped (well, I tagged along, mostly) to feed them. We chopped down some pumpkin, and some leaves (I need to figure out what that plant is. It's these big leaves, and humans eat them too, and I've both seen and eaten them many times during my time here, but I still can't remember what the plant is called), and also had some beans whole with the pod. And then we just gave them to all the turtles, throwing big pieces of the food in the tanks of the biggest turtles (tartaruga-da-amazônia), and just dropping the food (that was also chopped smaller) for the smaller ones in the smaller tanks.

And some of the turtles ate fish, instead of pumpkin and leaves. Which isn't surprising, since there were so many kinds of turtles. So many. I think I was told there are eighteen species of turtles in the Amazon area, although I was given a book about the turtles of Amazônia, and that only has sixteen. So I'm not entirely sure how many there are, or how many are included in each definition of a turtle. Because the book also includes a couple of species of jabutis that look like they live on land (as they should, if they're jabutis).

So yeah, there were a lot of different kinds of turtles. Some were weird, like this one, which is calles a mata-matá. I thought maybe this is the turtle that I had seen in some documentary, that has this thing attached to it's tongue that's pink and thin, and if it wiggles it just right it looks like a worm. So what it does is it just sits around with its mouth open on a river bottom, wiggling its tongue, and when a fish comes thinking it got an easy meal of this stupid worm that is so visibly squirming at the river bottom, the turtle snaps its jaws shut and the fish gets eaten instead. But no, that one is apparently the alligator snapping turtle and lives in the USA.

Also, there was a pink turtle. Which is not only a description of the turtle, but also the name of the species, which I think is cágado vermelho (=red). So this is one of those long-necked inter-digital-membraned ones, I suppose. 

Did you know, that turtles make sounds? They vocalise. Yeah, me neither. But apparently they do. That's one of the things the people studying the turtles at INPA are studying. And making sounds might be kind of important, because apparently that is (at least partly) what allows all the baby turtles to hatch at once, so they can make their way to the water in the safety created by the crowd. They start vocalising already in the eggs, and somehow agree on when it's time to go. I don't know how that works (I'm not sure the people studying this know exactly how it works either), but I think it's amazing.

Speaking of baby turtles. They also had some of those.
BABY TURTLES!

The baby turtles get a bigger picture than the rest, because they're baby turtles.
Those are about a quarter of a size of a palm, not including the fingers.

I think this is probably a good place to stop.
Except one more thing! PBS Eons (is an excellent youtube channel) just yesterday put out a video on turtle evolution! So that's nice timing.


(I might have to get a tortoise when I get back home.)
(I probably won't though, to be completely honest. But I'll keep dreaming of having one.)

~matu