HackiNews

• berlam
  > 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.

  https://sainthelenaisland.info/jonathan.htm

  • binaryturtle
    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.

    • dieselgate
      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.

      • luipugs
        Do you do something special for these ewes, like give them more food or something?

        • ljf
          We move them to another paddock, so the ram can focus his efforts on the remaining untupped ewes.
        • dieselgate
          In my experience no, they’re mostly all pastured.
    • jyounker
      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.

      • TomatoCo
        I wonder why not glue it to the top? Somewhere unobtrusive.

        • busymom0
          Could also put one of the thrusters from SpaceX rockets (or the roadster now) to automatically turn it right side up if it happens.

          • kirubakaran
            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.
      • bluebarbet
        Seems more likely the Lego would get crushed and the tortoise would be none the wiser.
  • whyage
    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?

    • jyounker
      > 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.

    • jyounker
      The web is a wonderful place: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/giant-tortoise-galapag...
    • bragr
      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)
    • yieldcrv
      They reproduce before it happens and the brood sizes are too numerous to select against that
    • notatoad
      Evolution can’t compete with Joe Hollins
  • hilsdev
    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.

    • hilsdev
      Although these days sometimes women will post your text messages on twitter, which may in fact be worse

      • jyounker
        If women are posting men's text messages on twitter it's usually because the text messages are horrifying.
      • Insanity
        If they do, you dodged a bullet lol.
    • fmajid
      Praying mantises are far swifter.
• wand3r
  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

  • f33d5173
    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.

    • wand3r
      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.

      • syshyk
        You'll have to ask your AI to keep trying and find a way, then report back the article.

        • lossyalgo
          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.

          • syshyk
            It didn't compile a custom client for you?

            I do look forward to 90s websites though.

  • throwaway2037
    Real question: Why are you using a VPN?
  • alex1138
    I tried selling a VPN service once called TurtleSpeed

    I have no idea why no one bought it

• dang
  Related. Others?

  '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)

  • gnabgib
    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
• dennis_jeeves2
  >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.
• throwaway2037
  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.

  • bloomingeek
    Screw reCAPTCHA! The damn images are almost always to dull to be of any use.
• mberning
  It is my dream to someday travel to St. Helena and Tristan da Cunha.

  • bruce511
    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.

    And these days you can get a flavor of local life via the local newspaper online. https://sthelenaonline.org/st-helena-independent/

    • trallnag
      Always like to scroll through available properties in such remote places
  • silves89
    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.

    • mberning
      Thanks for sharing that story
    • Ylpertnodi
      >and we all got pissed and shared the cheap cigs.

      If only you'd shared some cheap fags, too - guaranteed more reaction than even the epstein files would ever get.

      • silves89
        I originally wrote 'fags' but thought I'd better re-phrase for the Americans amongst us.

        • GJim
          Why?
  • nephihaha
    I'd like to see Ascension Island too, but it is apparently quite restricted.
• brcmthrowaway
  Is this where Napoleon was exiled??

  • forkerenok
    Yes, this is mentioned a couple of times in the article and in Jonathan's birthday song featured in one of the videos on the page. :)

    • brcmthrowaway
      Jesus, they did things differently back then
• nephihaha
  My father met Jonathan many decades ago. Jonathan has outlived him by quite some margin.
• Razengan
  We should elect him as president

  • bloomingeek
    Put on a nasty wig and lots of orange makeup and you have the same thing.