Dead tortoise shell alive with stories

This is not an albino tortoise, although there are such things. The Little Karoo is replete with ghost stories; none involving tortoises yet!

Albinos of the African spurred tortoise, scientifically Centrochelys sulcata and also commonly known as the sulcata tortoise, are widely sold in the USA and elsewhere, not nearly as white as this shell. Sulcate means furrowed or grooved, referring to the grooves on the shell of the particular tortoise.

Albino tortoises and turtles are uncommon. The African spurred tortoise is the most likely tortoise species to present albinism. The shells are then almost yellow, the eyes pink. This is the only remaining extant tortoise species of the Centrochelys genus, living in the southern parts of the Sahara Desert and the Sahel, across several African national states.

It is the third largest tortoise species on earth and the largest occurring in nature on continental mainlands anywhere. African spurred tortoise maximum size in the wild has been recorded as 83 cm and 98 kg. The Galapagos tortoise and the Aldabra giant tortoise (the largest land tortoise found on Aldabra in the Seychelles), are larger but island dwellers.

African spurred tortoises are burrowers, accessing moisture underground and avoiding some of the heat in their burrows. These tortoises are inadvertent gardeners as the moisture from soil or sand brought to the surface near their burrows and their droppings allow plants to grow better there, serving as conveniently nearby food, their private vegetable gardens.

Some tortoises in captivity suffering dietary deficiencies such as too little calcium and too much sugar (from too much fruit), may develop all sorts of carapace deformities.

The late Little Karoo resident in picture had no such problems. It lived on its proven natural diet and died after many eventful years in the veld near Oudtshoorn. Inspect the microsystems of under-the-bush ecological societies! Much goes on where humans expect nothing of interest.

When the carapace scutes, the outer scale-like covering patches loosen and fall, the white bony shell that decays more slowly is exposed. This happens slower than paint drying.

This was a leopard tortoise in its day, in Afrikaans a bergskilpad (mountain tortoise), scientifically Stigmochelys pardalis and previously Geochelone pardalis. It is the second largest tortoise species in Africa after the sulcata tortoise and the biggest in South Africa.

Leopard tortoises become from 60 years to 75 years old. The males become aggressive to each other during the mating season, butting and ramming each other. Butting of the female during mating also happens. Other than that, the leopard tortoise only retracts its head, feet and tail into the carapace as a defensive technique when danger approaches.

In human lore there is a story, however, of a tortoise killing a man! And a famous one at that: The story goes that the Greek dramatist of classical times, Aeschylus, was killed by a large eagle in Gela, Italy in 456 BC. It flew up with a tortoise in its claws, intending to drop its prey on a rock to break the shell for accessing the flesh as its next meal.

The eagle mistook Aeschylus’s bald head for a rock and the great man was killed by falling tortoise. Pliny the Elder reported in his Naturalis Historiae, one of the important books surviving from Roman times that Aeschylus stayed outdoors as far as possible in his old age, aware of a prophecy that he would be killed by a falling object.

The fullness of time is not to be avoided and so much for trusting prophets! Maybe Sophocles and Euripides, the main opposition in writing Greek tragedies in those days who both outlived Aeschylus by 50 years, appreciated the irony of the famous bald head resembling a rock in the eyes of the eagle.  

It has not become customary to wear helmets when eagles fly about bearing tortoises, looking for a rock. The probability involved in such occurrence is possibly underestimated but much less than dying of Covid-19 these days, for which helmets do as little as condoms (Riëtte, 2016; Wikipedia).