Tortoise Tomfoolery

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. This is not the future we were promised. Like, how about that for a tagline for the show? From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life. and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. You're about to listen to a brand new episode of Curious Cases. Shows are going to be released weekly, wherever you get your podcasts, but if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes first on BBC Sounds. I'm Hannah Fry. And I'm Dara Obrey. And this is Curious Cases. The show where we take your quirkiest questions. Your crunchiest conundrums. And then we solve them. With the power of science. I mean, do we always solve them? I mean, the hit rate's pretty low. But it is with science. It is with science. Big news in the O'Brien household. Yeah, actually, I didn't want to trouble you all with this, but it has been a difficult time. I've hardly been able to concentrate. Listen back over the previous episodes and see if you can feel the ripple of worry in my voice. Somebody went missing. so they've been missing for like weeks a key member of your household like a central member of the whole O'Brien team plan just wandered off to the garden and there was no sign of them for like six weeks you must have been sick with worry do you know honestly it was it preyed on my mind all the time I'm going how is Shelby doing did you look for Shelby we look for Shelby a lot actually but Shelby's difficult a spot and if Shelby wanders off into the garden Shelby goes underneath something you're not going to find Shelby and in fact it was when gardening was being done the lawn was being cut or something and somebody lifted up a leaf, whatever and Shelby was there. But luckily Shelby's now back indoors again. Well I mean luckily of all Shelby is a tortoise. Well there's that. I mean you should also put that in context that yeah it wasn't one of the children wandered off. We probably would have made a few calls then. Maybe a tiny bit more of an effort. Yeah whereas we just thought look he's out there in a confined area. We know the fences are all quite solid at a ground level. Like he's not going to repel up the wall and into a neighbouring garden. Wait hang on I want to know how how Shelby escaped in the first place? Oh, there's an outside area, right? So we let Shelby just wander around into the outside area. I believe a patio is the technical term for it. But for a long time, the steps in the patio were like a natural boundary because why would Shelby literally fling himself off the steps? He's a sensible guy. Yeah, except now he does. Now he gets to the end and he just goes, here we go again. And that launches himself off the steps in the hope that he lands correct side up to get into the grass. Can see the grass, presumably, and he goes, look at that. I can eat all of that. And so now it goes off the step. It's done a few times and we've always found him. But this time, this time couldn't find him. Couldn't find him. You know, there's a lot of, we're never going to see him again, but he's going to be out there. He's going to be out there like for God knows how long. But also a real strong sense of they're difficult to kill. They really are quite hardy. They sort of come with their own armour. Very much so. And like, I mean, worse comes to worse. Yeah, I'll just sleep. I'll just burrow into a hole and sleep here. And is he affected by the incident? In no way. There's a lot of timescale stuff here with tortoises that they're really, I don't think they register things in the way that we do. And now it was brought in and seems like, oh, I suppose my environment seems to be slightly warmer than it was. Like, honestly, when his memoirs are written, I'm not sure this will even get mentioned. Well, OK. I've got many, many, many more questions. I know. I mean, it's really opened the whole world. People don't think they have questions about tortoises, but people have lots of questions. Oh, people have questions about tortoises, including listener Laurie from California. My name is Laurie. I live in Berkeley, California in the United States. My question comes out of the Curious Cases episode on laughter, where one of your experts said that lizards don't play. And that doesn't fit with my experience of my pet tortoise, who seems to enjoy climbing and jumping off of things just for the pleasure of it. So my question is, do tortoises and reptiles more broadly play? It's an excellent question and we have experts to answer that question. Anna Wilkinson, a professor of animal cognition at the University of Lincoln and Unar Carl Averson, a herpetologist with the Zoological Society of London at London Zoo. OK, Anna, let's talk tortoises. How are they different from other types of turtle? Well, first of all, we have to remember that not everybody calls tortoises tortoises. So if you're in the US, everything is a turtle. But in the UK, tortoises, they are largely land-based. They have a slightly more domed shell and they often have quite stumpy legs. And they differ from terrapins, who live in largely freshwater, and who differ from turtles who live in the water almost all the time and only come out to lay eggs. Thing is, I think I might be alone here in that all three of you have... Have you got a tortoise pet? I do. Have you got a tortoise pet, Anna? I do. And Dara as well. Our newly returned tortoise pet. Newly returned tortoise pet. I think I'm alone. I'm the only one. Oh, they're amazing. Do they make good pets? They absolutely do, but you have to make sure you keep them in the right way. So one of the challenges with keeping reptiles as pets is... Hang on, I know this one. Don't let them wander into the garden on their own. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good one, yes. We're not necessarily very good at telling how they feel. And so we need to start to understand that and then make sure they're happy and they're amazing pets. Do you feel like you can bond with yours though Anna? Does your tortoise love you? My tortoise loves me as much as my dogs do I would say. So I've trained tortoises to come when I call they come to their names. My tortoises associate me with good things like food, nice heat and they respond to me like that just like my dogs do. You were nodding there. I mean they seem to have preferences to people, particularly my partner Camille. The tortoise I have is way more drawn to her than it is to me. She usually gives it the good food, so that obviously helps a bit. But yeah, they all have their own individual personality and they make fantastic pets. OK, maybe this is just my own snobbery here, but I didn't even think tortoises could recognise different humans. Well, there's a lot. OK, given that you don't have a tortoise, you've yet to experience the pleasure of engaging with a pet that you have to include in your will. for which provisions must be made in the event of your death of old age. Why, how long does your tortoise live for? Oh God, 100 I'd say would it be around? What species do you have? Oh my God, oh. Little one. Looks like a leaf. Small brown one, yay big, like whatever. I should have known this. Fair enough, fair enough. But I mean, Hermans tortoises, very popular. It's a Hermans. It's a Hermans. It's me, yeah. That's 80, 80 years, maybe 90. And how old is it now? Eight. Eight? you let a poor baby wander up into the garden on its own you know so there's a good on average 72 years left in this in this animal and probably not in me you know it a two generation pet Anna what yours I actually have two I have a Mediterranean spurthite who belongs to my son and was born about the same time as him with the idea that she can be his sibling. And my other tortoise is a Redfoot and he's about 20-odd now. But they don't live quite as long. They only live till about sort of 40, 50-ish in captivity. OK, so all being well, you might die at the same time. I think so. As my colleague said, you know, they last about a career, which is very convenient for me. The thing is, I think people think of tortoises as quite slow, quite solitary, not very interactive. I mean, do you have any fun stories that might change my mind? I have hundreds. They are anything but our research shows. So we've shown that tortoises can recognise different people. We've shown that they can do so using the face, but also voices. How do you test the tortoises recognising? So we would present them with photos of people they know and photos of people they don't know, see where they spend their time looking, and similar things with the auditory stimuli. So we would present them voices they know and voices they don't know. And you can look at differences in their responding, just like we do with any other species. And our later work has shown that they can remember information for a long, long time. So they basically outlast my PhD students. So we've shown they can remember 18 months. And we've just got data in last week showing that gopher tortoises can remember for 26 months. Wait, what kind of stuff are they remembering here? This is sort of visual information. So with the gopher tortoises, we're looking at what can lead to their success when they're reintroduced into the wild. So we need to know what information is important to them. So we look to see whether they can discriminate between colours and shapes and things like that. And we find that colour is really important to them and they can remember different colours associated with different outcomes for 26 months. So it tells us about what information they need when we're going to introduce them into a reserve. Their vision as well, they have very good night vision because the longer you can stay out during the day to forage, the more food you can get. Their colour vision is infinitely better than ours. We have three cones in our eyes. They have four. They're tetrachromatic. they can see about what is it 10 million colours I think we can see about a million they can see ultraviolet light so you know a lot of people kind of look at them and think there's not much going on there but there's a lot How come tortoises keep getting lost then if they're so great at all this? I don't think the tortoise thinks they're lost No I mean the tortoise is in foliage eating you know and so they're very happy about the thing so in our perception they're lost but actually the tortoise is like Augustus Gloop at the start of Johnny the Chocolate Factory coming to me to a land of pure imagination. The tortoises are suddenly surrounded by food. So, yeah, they're delighted, yeah. OK, maybe I have slightly underestimated how impressive they were. But what about play specifically, Anna? Is there any evidence of tortoises playing? There's quite a lot of evidence now with reptiles playing. And for me, some of the best evidence is in turtles. So there's work looking at Nile soft-shelled turtles and looking at object play. And it actually shows that turtles who were potentially displaying problem behaviours in zoos. If you introduce objects, they interact with them and they play about 30% of their time. But in order to see animals play, they need to be in the right sort of environment. They need to be comfortable. They need to be non-stressed. They need to have their needs met. And so actually, we might see it more in captivity than we might in the wild. Yeah, so we found that Shelby's attracted to colour and colourful objects. And I've also had the videos of just being pushing a ball around. Go on, show us. Let's find. OK, so there is a video of Shelby in the garden playing football, pushing the official Euro 2024 ball around the garden. I'm setting the ball up and look, and they're going for it, going for it. He is definitely nosing the ball. Oh, yeah, yeah. And they will follow a bright object around. I will say that there is behaviour, if we can be discreet about this, which gets very excited and very agitated about these things. And so I wonder if it's play in any other sense if it's... Sexy play. Sexy play. If it's intimate time for Shelby. Is that a thing? Yes, yes. Okay, fine. Yeah, there's quite a lot of anecdotal evidence of them doing that, yeah. Yeah, and so with your children go, look, he's playing. So they're like, oh, let's go look at something else. Yeah, exactly. But hang on there, Anna. Is that what we're talking about here? Are we talking about just, I'm trying to think of a polite way to phrase this. Pretend mating. Pretend mating, there we go. Or is it something that resembles more what we might consider to be play? Well, I think we need to think about what play is, and that's a massive debate. But generally, we sort of think of it as a non-functional behaviour within the environment that it's taking place in. Normally, we think it needs to be sort of spontaneous, potentially pleasurable. and it needs to differ from serious behaviours in different ways. So if we are thinking about mating, it would differ from that in terms of the timing in which it occurs. Normally maybe more juvenile animals or it's expressed in a slightly different way. So we need to see play as something which we see animals repeated. And again, we only see it when the animals are comfortable. That criteria is used across species. You could see how that would easily fit a dog or a primate. But actually, I think probably the examples that you guys have been talking about, it would fit those as well. Is there an emotional component to this as well? I mean, can you tell what sort of mood tortoises are in? You absolutely can. We actually did a piece of work looking at this, which came out a few months ago, basically asking the question, can tortoises experience mood states? So we presented tortoises with what we call a cognitive bias test. this is something which was developed for humans and it's basically looking to see if your animals are pessimists or optimists so we will put a food bowl let's say on the left hand side and if it's on the left it has food in you then put a food bowl on the right hand side and if it's on the right it doesn't have food and you train the animals i would say tortoises learn this as fast as dogs do and then you put the food bowl in the middle if your tortoise is optimistic it should go pretty fast to the food bowl. If it's pessimistic, it might go much slower or not bother to go at all. And so we ran this with our tortoises and I was thrilled to find out that they were overall optimistic, which is good. But we also looked at other measures of emotions in them. And what we found was that the tortoises who are more optimistic also showed less anxiety behaviour in novel situations. And those more pessimistic showed more anxiety behaviour in novel situations. So it's suggesting we can tell their short-term emotions, but also their general mood state. Does this align with what you know of your pet tortoise? Absolutely, yeah. He has bad days. He has good days. There's some days where he will rush towards his football or be really interested in what we're doing and what's going on around him. Other days, just tucks away, just not having it. So yeah, I would say they definitely have different moods on different days. And there's also other factors like seasonality and stuff that would play a little factor in it. How about play? Are you convinced that your tortoise is capable of play? Yeah, I would say so, yeah. With my tortoise, he will explore every inch of the flat. He has preferences where he wants to hang around in the flat. He will investigate objects, bite this, check this out. Yeah, it doesn't seem to serve any purpose, it's just curiosity. Yeah, and obviously there will distinguish between a temporary object and a permanent object. in as much as if you put something down that is new like even a plastic bag on the ground they'll come over and they'll bang against it like for some time they'll headbutt it but they don do that with the table or the furniture and the thing they know that that there all the time So they go to a newer object They seem to enjoy he seems to enjoy plastic objects and brightly shaped plastic objects more than darker objects They make noise. Were you expecting this as well? No. Oh, yeah. What noise do they make? Yeah. Kind of a noise. While I'm having the ball. Yeah, there's a bit of a noise. But like it is, a sound you hear quite often. But it's quite a distinct sound. but they'll investigate new objects and then they'll push them around. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. The room. and hiding under the sofa for a while. They're not high maintenance. No. As a pet. Possibly the same amount of maintenance as other animals. It's just spread over 80 years. The other part of Laurie's question, by the way, was about reptiles more broadly. And that becomes more tricky, Oona, because we're talking about such a massive range of animals. Yeah. And it's tricky to define, like Anne was saying, what is play behaviour. It's really tricky to define exactly what that is. But, I mean, we conducted a study at SotoZo where we put some new plants in an enclosure with tree monitors. And basically we were filming them and doing visual observations. And they would go up to those plants. They would bite them and shred them systematically. These are insectivores, strictly carnivores. So they don't eat plant matter. So it makes you think, why would you be doing that? What's the motivation there? They're not looking for food, but they are going up to these new plants, tearing them apart with their claws, biting bits of them, taking them to other places, rubbing those bits against locks and stuff, and then dropping them and kind of doing that again and again, which is not typical behaviour. So it was quite interesting seeing that. Like, what's the purpose? Books, presumably at ZSL, it's the one thing you're always looking for. It's like, is this behaviour of an animal in distress? Yeah, we're always, you know, their welfare is our top priority. But you're able to say that that's not what's going on here. No, no, exactly. Yeah, so it did fit those criteria where it doesn't seem to serve any survival purpose. And a number of different animals doing this. So in this case, there was two tree monitors and then Bristol Sioux helped us with this study as well. And they had two green tree monitors and they were doing a very, very similar behaviour. How do we notice in the wild? Well, we know very little about tree monitors in the wild. They're very hard to spot. They're arboreal, so they're really high up in the trees. So we don't really know what goes on up there. Just get a ladder. A big letter, yes. I feel like there's a solution to that problem. Drive a cherry picker into the rainforest and up you go. So thinking in terms of play and reptiles more broadly. Crocodilians as well. Crocodilians, yeah. I did bring it with me here. Not a crocodile, please don't. I have a Nile crocodile skull. Oh, wow. Fairly young one, but that is a Nile crocodile skull. Oh, my goodness me. These are not the faces of play. No, no, I know. So it's very difficult to imagine a crocodile really taking any foot in anything. But they have seen play behaviour in crocodilians as well. What, as in like, am I pretending to be a log? Well, they do that really well. But in this case, you know, they were, I believe it was a zoo in Morocco, where they were going up. It was like a water feature within a habitat. And they would go, climb up there, slide down. Do you know, I actually think that I have a video of this. There we go. I would love to see it. This is a crocodile on a fun water slide. at Morocco Zoo. Here we go. Hold on. Oh, that's fantastic. So you're just bounding around the slide. So we should probably describe this. So essentially at the zoo, it's like you have two separate water enclosures that are connected by this kind of, I mean, there's no other way to explain it really. No, like two bodies of water. But you can slide from one to the other and the crocodiles are doing that. We're not saying that there is a water park. Not yet. I mean, it would add an element of jeopardy, wouldn't it? Are you going to come out alive? Do you know the clip, Anne? Have you seen it before? Yeah, I've seen the clip. I haven't seen the animals repeating the behaviour, though. And that's, for me, something super important. And maybe there are longer clips which show that. But as you guys have said, you want to make sure the animals are doing it again and again because this is the repeatability of the play behaviour, which would be really important. So maybe it took a wrong turn and ended up just sliding down. It could have done. Exactly. So, OK, if you're sceptical of that clip, are you sceptical of play in other reptiles more generally? I actually think there's really good evidence. And the reason I think the evidence is so good is because people are so sceptical. They're quite willing to accept this sort of stuff in mammals because we're really good at reading mammals because we are mammals. But actually with reptiles, they don't have facial expressions. They don't necessarily exhibit certain behaviours in the way mammals would. So actually some of the evidence we see in reptiles has had much more critique than some of the evidence we might see in mammals just because of those differences. So I'm not sceptical of the crocs. I just want to know that the animal is repeating it, if that makes sense. One man has given a lot of thought to the issue of how do you identify what play is in this context is Gordon Burghardt, a distinguished service professor in the Departments of Psychology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee. Play has many meanings. So there's no one function of play or one thing that play does. And this is true of animals throughout the animal kingdom. In the old days, it was only thought that some mammals and maybe a few birds played. But now we've found out that fish play, turtles and lizards. And now there are papers on octopus playing and honeybee or bumblebees playing. So play is much more ubiquitous throughout the animal kingdom than we previously thought. I wrote the book called The Genesis of Animal Play, Testing the Limits, as a way to put together criteria for identifying play, and then also coming up with a theory to try to interpret why we see play in some animals and not others, which I call surplus resource theory. That play is something that develops when animals have extra resources, when they are capable of relatively complicated behavior. That's where we see more playful animals than others. Reptiles are rather diverse groups. So one of the first examples of playing a reptile that I published involved a Niles Hoffshell Turtle at the National Zoo in Washington D And the curator thought this animal was in a very sterile concrete tank and it wasn doing very well So he thought, well, maybe the animal is bored. And so he provided basketballs, hoops, hoses for the animals to engage with, and it started doing lots of playful behavior. And I got intrigued by that. I took a bunch of videos and we analyzed it and did the first quantitative study on playfulness. And it wasn't a turtle. But since then, there's videos of tortoises playing with balls, for instance. And there's films of crocodiles going down water slides. But the best example I have is a video that a student found of a ball python playing fetch with its owner. It would throw the ball out and the python would scoop it up and bring it back. So under certain circumstances, we can see pretty amazing playful behaviour in reptiles when the opportunities and conditions are correct. I really like this idea that play is something that happens once all of your basic needs are there. Because that is, you've described life in captivity, life as a pet. I mean, we've got rid of predators, we're supplying heat and food and water. And now you've got all the time in the world. I mean, people too, though, right? Like I'm much more playful on a two week long summer holiday. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I don't have to do the washing up and go foraging to Tesco once a week. So would we see behaviour that you would not see in the wild? I think it's quite possible. And I think you have to think about the ecology of most reptile species. So mammals have parental care in the wild, right? But most reptiles don't experience that. So they do need to search for their own food, many species from hatching. And so because of this, they don't live in this sort of environment that you might see play in mammals occur. However, in captivity, if we're doing what we should be doing for our reptiles, then they do. And so this is maybe why we might see it more in captivity. Equally, it might just be incredibly challenging to observe in the wild as well. Yeah, I agree, because we have the privilege of spending a substantial amount of time with these animals so we can see how they spend their time. and we can learn so much about them. So it's hard to tell if this does happen in the world, but we're certainly seeing it in our suits. That makes me feel a little bit sad for all of the crocodiles that get this really bad rep and it's like, actually, they're just a bit stressed out. Could be, yeah. You put them on a two-week holiday and they'll be playing with the rest of them. Slides, they'll be in the queue going up to the top again. They go, which one do you want? And they'll be going, I want to go in the blue one this time. And they're going, away you go. But let's make sure somebody's out of the slide before you arrive in. Wait for the green light. Yeah, there you go. So if they play, can we play with them? Should we be thinking in terms of what do we do to make their lives more playful? Yeah, I mean, as long as you do your research, set up the habitat so it kind of fits their natural environment. And once all of those needs are met, then, yeah, you can put objects in, you can change things around a bit just to enrich their kind of day-to-day, definitely, add bits and bobs in there and see how they react. Does this change how we treat them as pets, though? Should we be treating them in a slightly different way based on all of this, Anna? I would say absolutely. So the way humans think about animal welfare is related to their intelligence in many ways. So, for example, if you think a fish can remember for three seconds, you'd probably be quite happy to put it in one of those tiny glass bowls without anything in however if i tell you a goldfish can remember for three months it makes you think a lot more about how they should be cared for and reptiles have had a really bad reputation in terms of their intelligence and their capacity i mean there are scientific papers which say they're sluggish inert and unresponsive and that's because scientists took tropical animals put them in cold rooms and tested their intelligence and funnily enough they didn't do anything So now we can test them in the right way and we're meeting their needs before we test them. We see remarkable abilities in these guys and we should treat them as such. We just might not be able to pick up on them as easily as we can with other mammals. So there you go, Dara. Keep the patio door open. Let Shelby do his own thing. He's more than capable. Clearly, absolutely. By the way, where is Shelby's actual ancestral home? Oh, Herman's tortoise. Yes. They're quite widespread. You'll see them in the middle of Europe. Okay fine Yeah yeah yeah So they can survive Like really cold spells So if I went to where Shelby's natural You know cousins are Can we assume he's German? He has that Mien He has that kind of air Slightly implacable And but good at football So if I went there And just gave them a ball I think they would come up to it You know But there's only one way To find out We should check it out What a travel documentary That would be A return to the turtles As I as opposed to all these comedians who do shows where they go travel with their mother or father I travel with my daughters an absolute pleasure thank you very much I'm certainly taking a lot from this you've learned a lot as well you know what I'll be honest I've slightly changed my mind you have convinced me there's more to them than initially meets the eye by the way 23 and a half hours a day there's not more to them there are a lot of quiet times as well but thank you to Anna Wilkinson Una Averson and Gordon Burkhardt alright I admit it I was wrong. Yeah. Look, it takes a bigger person to say that they have, you know, misrepresented tortoises. Yeah. And the tortoise lobby, as you've noticed, can be quite strong about this. Quite powerful. It's true. They are full of little surprises. But they dole those surprises slowly over the 80 years. One a decade. Yeah. Everybody's having to go, oh, there's a new development. I mean, I still thought even 10% of the way through his life, Dara. Who is it going to in your will? I don't know. I really feel that I don't get to choose that. It's very much going to have to be an awkward an awkward conversation you know it's a bit like you know where they go but you must stay one night in a haunted house like whoever the lawyer is after my death will go the estate is being given to whoever will take on the tortoise the tortoise comes with all of the money attached maybe that's it a single trust fund yeah do I want it that much because you know there's another 45 years on this thing yeah oh you know but we love our little shop to Curious Cases on BBC Sounds and make sure you've got push notifications turned on and we'll let you know as soon as new episodes are available. Why do we do certain things like blush, lie or laugh? Things we do every day that don't always make a whole lot of sense. You're 30, 3-0 times more likely to laugh if there's somebody else with you than if you're on your own. 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