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Lonesome George Is Dead At 100
New submitter camperdave writes "Lonesome George, the last remaining tortoise of his kind and a conservation icon, died on Sunday of unknown causes, the Galapagos National Park said. He was thought to be about 100 years old."
Let's get the pedantic train started early: George was the last of his subspecies (Canoe gets this right... in one of two mentions.) A lot of other sources have been saying species incorrectly. Here's the corresponding Wikipedia page. There are still giant tortoises on Galapagos, just not any of the ones native to the island of La Pinta.
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Was his DNA sequenced? Has any of his genetic material been preserved? It would really be sad if the best we can offer the last specimen of such a magnificent species is a spot in a museum display case for his carcass.
He did; three times with two females from a different island a few years ago. The eggs were infertile.
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Different species, they hoped was "close enough" He should have his DNA be stored, maybe clone him in the future.
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The official classification is that they were subspecies, actually. However, especially in modernity, the term "species" is reserved for groups that definitely can't be interbred with viable offspring (for whatever reason), so we might as well apply that here, although it's all still hazy.
I believe they were separated by about ten million years; to put that in perspective, humans and chimps split 4–8 million years ago. Since one of the major limitations in cross-reproduction between two isolated species comes directly from the molecular clock of nucleotide change (specifically: different patterns of DNA hairpinning cause the paired chromosomes to be unable to recognize each other during gamete formation), even if they had managed to reproduce, it's almost certain the offspring would've been infertile.
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Yes, but you don't suddenly drop dead from being old. There's generally a specific medical cause.
...also, another point of pedantry: it was suspected he was at least a hundred. It was theorized that may have been much older, perhaps closer to 200 than 100. Turtles are so damn rugged and scaly that it's impossible to really tell just by observation. Dying at the age of one hundred would actually have been a little premature for a Galapagos tortoise, equivalent to probably 60 or 65ish for a human, I think.
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he could have been impotent thus the inability to interbreed would not be able to produce offspring while still compatible species
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Those two things are not mutually exclusive - in fact, that's pretty much how all creatures die, outside accidents and being killed by external causes.
They would have inserted frog DNA to bridge the gaps, but we all know how that turns out.
Monstar L
he could have been impotent thus the inability to interbreed would not be able to produce offspring while still compatible species
Nah, he was just wise with age, and took precautions so that he didn't need to spend the golden years heating formula and changing turtle diapers.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
Well, if they can live to be 200 years old, then relatively speaking, 100(ish) isn't that old...
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Turtles are so damn rugged and scaly that it's impossible to really tell just by observation.
Well, now they can just count the rings.
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I would've never guessed George Thorogood could've even made it to that age, what with his pal Johnny Walker and his brothers Black and Red.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
Nothing better on a cold night like this than some boiling hot soup! Why don't I just go ahead and heat you up a cup? It's made from turtles! Turtles that you love!
I hope we keep extensive, redundant dna samples. There's no reason we can't at least keep a record for posterity.
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
Even if his DNA wasn't sequenced, it should be possible to clone him (and the females mentioned in the article). I'm hoping they took tissue samples from the females, otherwise there would just be an endless line of lonesome georges (unless he could be bred with other sub-species).
I would assume that cloning reptiles is much easier than cloning mammals, didn't they do a frog decades ago? Of course it would be ironic if, due to "mistakes" in the cloning process, they expressed some long inactive part of the DNA and ended up with a dinosaur instead! (I'm not sure if a turtle is technically a dinosaur already but you know what I mean; big, scary and capable of starring in a movie).
That theory is out; turtles don't lay eggs unless mating has occurred, and three clutches were found.
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I think you may have misunderstood my delivery; that's what I meant.
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Your signature does more to compromise your neutrality than your post's text. I'm impressed!
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I'm pretty sure that only works on elephants and investment bankers.
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"...died on Sunday of unknown causes..." Old As Fuck. That's why. Fucker's 700 years old in dog years.
Old? For an apricot, yes. For a head of lettuce, even more so. For a mountain, I have not even begun. For a turtle, I was just right.
...all the way down.
[/pratchett]
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is everyone sure that he was turtally dead?
Yes?
Turtle bummer, man!
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"About 100"
At least now they can chop him in half and count the rings.
I'm not going to let the minor differences between turtles and tortoises get in the way of bad jokes, so don't flipper out.
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Lonesome George, the last remaining tortoise of his kind and a conservation icon, died on Sunday of unknown causes, the Galapagos National Park said. He was thought to be about 100 years old.
Anyone else misread that as "conservative icon" and think this was going to be a story about a pre-Tea Party republican senator?
I find myself wondering whether he would remember the loss of so many family members
Not any more...
It doesn't work that way for everything. In reptiles, the females have ZW, and the males ZZ. This means when a female self fertilizes (parthenogenesis) they can produce male and female offspring, as well as WW (usually inviable).
I believe they were separated by about ten million years; to put that in perspective, humans and chimps split 4–8 million years ago.
And to put THAT in perspective. He tried it three times ago with a female-thing that's even 2 to 6 million years further apart from his biology than man is away from monkeys.
Yuck. Must. not. think. about it.
bickerdyke
I have a pet turtle that has laid eggs twice now, most recently last week. It hasn't met another turtle since I bought it as a baby from the pet store, several years ago.
This reference could only be made due to the recent Humble Bundle...
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
The XX/XY sex determination system is mostly the domain of mammals. Most reptiles and birds use the ZZ/ZW where the ZZ chromosome holders are male. Some reptiles use temperature based sex determination that is considered to be the ancestor of the other forms.
Sorry, but breeding is not a definitive black and white for species. That two populations can interbreed and produce fertile offspring does not automatically make them the same species (grizzly bears and polar bears), any more than an inability to interbreed means they're not (ie. chihuahuas and Great Danes).
The species concept is considerably more complex than inter fertility, and is really a spectrum of traits that will always be somewhat subjective. Nature doesn't follow nice clean Linnean lines.
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Shh! You're ruining my gig! These people think I know something!
At least one news site made the same mistake. I inferred it from there, after giving up my hunt for an answer to that exact question and assuming they knew something. Clearly trusting journalists was a mistake.
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I was waiting for that to come along. Did I ever mention how lousy my ecology professor was? Taxonomy always seemed like a really fun area, but I never got around to a population genetics course. Time to crack open one of the fifty-ish books I have that covers it, I guess.
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Let me ask you a question as a biologist -- I've learned too that species encompasses all individuals who can interbred with each other and produce fertile offspring. But some livings have a too weird reproductive cycle to be reconsilidated with that definition.
Lets look at the common dandelion (Taraxacum sect. Ruderalia). There are three kinds of dandelion plants out there, looking all the same. But some are diploid, others triploid and quadroploid. Triploid dandelions are sterile, they can only clone itself to reproduce. Diploid dandelions can interbred with other diploid dandelions, and their offspring is quadroploid. Quadroploid dandelions can't interbred with each other, but diploid dandelions can interbred with quadroploids, and the offspring is triploid. Here the story would come to an end, because triploids are sterile. But sometimes during cloning, something goes wrong, and a diploid seed is produced, causing a fertile diploid dandelion to grow, and now the cycle starts again. So how does a biologist classify the dandelion individual, where most dandelions are infertile, some can't interbred with each other, and only one kind is quite fertile, but does not reproduce itself during interbreding? One could define one dandelion individual as being all the plants from a diploid, it's quadroploid offspring, the triploid F2 generation and then all clones until the next diploid clone. But then we get into the "divisible individual" contradiction.
How does a biologist deal with such situations? Just some handweaving "Yes, this is weird, but you get the term species in general, do yo"?
Nature always finds a way...
Yes, but you don't suddenly drop dead from being old.
He was a Tortoise, they don't suddenly do ANYTHING.
Yes, with no women around he should have been able to live forever. I think the scientists are to blame for introducing him to not just one, but two females. There's your cause for reduced lifespan right there.
I just sorta had my butt handed to me on that question, so I may not be the best person to consult about the basics of taxonomy. I do however believe there ought to be a disclaimer somewhere at the start of every genetics textbook that goes something to the tune of "don't ask about plants and ploidy, you'll never be satisfied with the answer."
But to make a long story short, I would actually map the different ploidies of dandelions to something like sexes. Organisms adopt some heinously bizarre techniques for managing population size when they're wildly successful, and it sounds to me like this is a reproductive strategy that's working quite handsomely for them. It kinda reminds me of C. elegans, which is a 95% self-fertilizing hermaphrodite, 5% male species; the males exist to jumble things up now and then. (And there are certainly plenty of species with infertile members, like social insects!)
Interestingly, there are ample parallels to be drawn in computing with various techniques for jiggling neural networks to get them out of local minima.
In the species question. I'm pretty sure that the content of the chromosomes is considered a factor as well. Wikipedia has an article on the species problem (if you aren't holding the answer behind your back, since you clearly know your Mendelian genetics!) which I am probably not yet qualified to comment on the reliability of. The hard truth, though, is that the word is archaic fluff, and that organisms fall in and out of style (mostly out) with each other all the time. A slightly better concept is this thing, but that has more to do with population flow than anything rightly concrete.
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Clean livin'. Clean livin'.
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The problem is that the species distinction doesn't hold over time, and with time being a necessary factor for evolution, the species definition is not necessarily in its best shape within the evolutionary framework.
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That would require not only memory but a great deal of understanding. I find it hard to accept a tortoise could possess such mental power. Given lizards are older than mammals were that the case I suspect we'd all be cowering in the shadow of our overload's shells.
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he could have been impotent thus the inability to interbreed would not be able to produce offspring while still compatible species
Well, he was a hundred years old. Did they try giving him Viagra(tm)?
I thought reptiles didn't have willies?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Maybe he's just having a nap? He is 100 after all.. is he wearing his slippers?
But seriously - just how do you know a giant tortoise is dead? Did they check his pulse? Did they wait until he started to smell? (I refer back to him being 100..)
All the news agencies had already covered and forgotten this story by now.
Frankly, I think a tortoise could have gotten this story up on his own front page in less time...
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Out of all the reptiles, humans seem to connect better with Turtles then say Snakes, or Lizzards. If a Snake Species went extinct, there would be a lot less sorrow then for a Tortoise.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Yes a turtle that has strong jumping legs and a long sticky tongue.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
From my science courses, I know that God put the dinosaurs fossils in the ground, and that evolution don't exists. We always have the same species/subspecies/... form the beginning of the world (arround 6000 years ago.) So how does that fits in the model ? - Georges never exists, God just gives us a dead body and implant some fake memories in our brain ? - Georges will reborn (and he is in fact the son of God) ? - Some other explanation ?
The dandelion strategy makes it possible to spread mutations fast by cloning and still have a plan B if the mutations don't work out positively. It's a strategy adapted to fast adaption. :)
They didn't even bury him in his own grave?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
He's been preserved in a jar for future study.
They weren't turtle-wives, they were basically his turtle-concubines. The exertion could still be bad for his lifespan but would do wonders for life quality! An excellent tradeoff I'd say B-)
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
When we visited in 2009, we were told by one of the guides that she was his personal fluffer (my words). That's gotta be hard to put on a resume.
You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.
How does a biologist deal with such situations? Just some handweaving "Yes, this is weird, but you get the term species in general, do yo"?
Yes exactly. Nature does not have to fit into easily deliniable categories like species. These are categories that we invented for our use. A few edge cases don't impair the general usefulness of the concept of species.
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Whatever dandelions do, they are damn successful. You can't kill those bastards. They just keep coming back. They're like roaches, and mosquitoes.
21st Century Renaissance Man
I just wish he was lonesome Fred, that way we could sing the entire "Not yet dead / Not Dead Fred" from Monty Python to celebrate his passing...
(yeah, just saw the musical by Eric Idle, hilarity).
-nB
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Trusting journalists is almost always a mistake.
Any time I gain sufficient knowledge on a topic to know what's going on before the journalists pick up on it, I find articles from almost any news source with completely unreferenced, poorly explained or downright wrong simplifications to what they're talking about.
Unfortunately the topics on which my knowledge is that deep and up to date are somewhat limited. So i can't say if it's endemic.
Hope somebody saved its DNA or at least sequenced it, so that the species can be revived some day.
Nature has declared this a failed species. Who are we to question nature's logic?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
You could have just said it was turtles all the way down.
A much easier answer and much less confusing.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That would probably offend the Pratchett fans!
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Not to get too picky, but: I went to Wikipedia to find out what the heck a C. elegans was. (Nematode) Anyway, the split seem to be more 99.95%/0.05%.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
I thought I remembered reading about this. Um... yeah, it works for turtles, too. Well, young turtles at least. Google for turtle count rings.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
See the timestamp on my comment? Yeah, I shouldn't be posting at 4 AM. You're right; the number I was taught was one in two thousand. I have no idea why I wrote that.
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Yes, but you don't suddenly drop dead from being old.
He was a Tortoise, they don't suddenly do ANYTHING.
Evidently, they do drop dead.... that is something.
I think the "viable offspring" is the closest to a comprehensive definition of species as you'll get aside from "I know it when I see it."
Species is, when you get down to it, a purely artificial distinction for our convenience. Nature doesn't think in terms of species. We're trying to apply a rational, universal organizing scheme to something that is not organized like that.
Furthermore, when you consider that the vast preponderance of life on the Earth is bacteria that don't mate and have no real cohesion and cannot really be put into species, it makes the species question trivial anyway.
Not exactly. My children have some guinea pigs. So we often harvest all the dandelions we can find, because the guinea pigs absolutely love them. At the end of the summer, nearly no dandelions are left, except for the small little plants that come out of some cracks in the yard, which we don't plug, because they are too small. If you consider dandelions weed you will find that they grow everywhere and are not killable. If you actually look for dandelions to feed your pets, they get sparse, and sparse, and then you have to ask the neighbours if you can get their dandelions too, because you already drove your dandelion stock to the brink of extinction. :)
I like dandelions. I pick the flowers for making wine with and you are correct. I am completely out of dandelions right now. You cam also eat the roots and the leaves.
21st Century Renaissance Man
Ah, study. Like the research the Japanese do on whales?
You know, the ones where the results are "they taste very nice, thanks".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."