They see for the first time in the wild a giant tortoise attacking and eating a chick. It’s a “horrible” incident, scientists say

(CNN) – The researchers captured the moment when a lifelong vegetarian animal crossed the line and ate meat. And what made it even more “horrifying” is that it is a turtle.

Scientists captured the moment on video when a Seychelles giant tortoise, previously thought to be a vegetarian, attacked and ate a chick in what they say is the first documentation of deliberate hunting in any wild tortoise species.

“This is completely unexpected behavior and has never been seen in wild tortoises before,” Justin Gerlach, director of studies at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and an affiliate researcher at the University of Cambridge Museum of Zoology, said in a statement Monday.

“The giant tortoise chased the chick along a log, eventually killing the chick and eating it,” said Gerlach, who led the study, published Monday in the Current Biology journal.

“It was a very slow encounter, with the tortoise moving at its normal slow pace; the whole interaction took seven minutes and it was pretty horrible.”

An “experienced” turtle hunter?

Anna Zora, a conservation manager at Frégate Island and a co-author of the study, captured the ordeal that took place in July 2020.

“When I saw the turtle move in a strange way, I sat down and looked, and when I realized what I was doing I started recording,” Zora said in the statement.

Gerlach told CNN that the way the turtle moved toward the chick suggested he had “experience.”

“He’s moving very deliberately; he’s not just wandering around, he’s looking at this chick and walking straight at him, clearly with the intention of doing something. That suggests to me that he’s doing it with intention. You know what you’re doing, you’ve already done this. before, “he said.

The researchers captured the moment when a Seychelles giant tortoise, Aldabrachelys gigantea, attacked and ate the chick.

Although turtles are believed to be vegetarians, they have been seen “opportunistically” eating carrion as well as snail bones and shells in search of calcium.

“It’s quite common for herbivores to eat some dead animal as a source of free protein, essentially. But this is the first video evidence of them deliberately killing for food,” he said.

Still, the team cannot say for sure how common this behavior is among turtles and plans to study them further.

Turtles, traditionally herbivorous animals

Giant tortoises are the largest herbivores on the Galapagos and Seychelles, eating up to 11% of the vegetation, the researchers said. Gerlach added that turtle behavior is unlikely to significantly affect populations of these types of chicks.

Experts said the new hunting behavior was caused by the “unusual” combination of a colony of tree-nesting swallows and a population of giant tortoises residing on the Seychelles’ Fregate Island, which is home to around 3,000 tortoises.

It is not the first time that unusual lethal attacks have been observed between animal species in the wild. In 2019 chimpanzees were observed to kill gorillas in the wild for the first time.

“It’s probably not uncommon for animals to surprise our expectations by eating unexpected things that can be unique,” Gerlach explained.

“We should try to avoid having too many assumptions about what animals are going to do or what they are doing. And it really shows the value of observation. Just by observing and recording what animals are doing, you can find really unexpected things, things that we could not deliberately find out, it has to be by chance, “he said.