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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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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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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'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!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
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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?
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.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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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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)?
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.
He's been preserved in a jar for future study.
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.
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%.
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