angry giant tortoise chases documentary maker

'The more we watch, the more we learn,' agreed Rob Baldwin, a conservation biologist at Clemson University who researches reptiles. 'Their lives are secret from us, unless we watch them.' 'It also shows that you can still make unexpected discoveries by observation,' Gerlach added. There's more to them than we think, he said. Gerlach is a giant tortoise researcher and an author of the newly published study in the scientific journal (Opens in a new tab) Current Biology (Opens in a new tab). 'It changes the way most people think about tortoises,' Justin Gerlach, a biologist at the University of Cambridge, told Mashable.

The evidence of the attack is compelling for a number of reasons, not least because it underscores how our understanding of nature is still evolving, and challenges assumptions about how animals live. The footage of this wild event is the first known documentation of a giant tortoise (who largely devours plants) hunting and eating another animal, though people have reported (but not recorded) this behavior before. Once retrieved, the chick was swallowed whole.' 'The chick, now dead, was dropped and the tortoise had to climb off the log to retrieve it. 'At the end of the log the chick stopped retreating, enabling the tortoise to close its jaws directly on the head of the chick,' the researchers wrote (Opens in a new tab). The tortoise, who typically devours plants on the island, opened its mouth wide. The giant female tortoise lumbered towards a small bird (a tern chick) who was standing on a log. They grabbed a camera and started filming. Biologists on Frégate Island, east of Africa, spotted a giant tortoise acting strangely in July 2020.

Angry giant tortoise chases documentary maker