An ancestor has stepped down. After about 141 years of life, the West Coast Zoo’s oldest turtle died on Nov. 20, the Associated Press reported in a Nov. 25 article. Due to his advanced age, he suffered from bone disease and had to be stung by veterinary services.
The animal, which came from the Bronx Zoo, had lived in a San Diego wildlife park since 1928 or 1931, according to its agent. A true star, nicknamed The “zoo queen”Gramma has lived through two world wars and seen about twenty presidents of the United States pass through.
“It’s amazing that they managed to survive so many trials”reacts to the Associated Press Cristina Park, 69, a regular visitor to the zoo where Gramma lives. The announcement of this disappearance brought back for the sixty-year-old reptile enthusiast one of his first childhood memories at this San Diego zoo, where, at age 3 or 4, he rode a turtle..
This reptile from the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador can live around a hundred years in the wild, compared to twice as long in captivity. And Gramma wasn’t the oldest of her species. The oldest of them was named Harriet and lived in an Australian zoo until she was 175 years old. Captured in the Galapagos Islands around 1830, it became extinct in 2006.
The Galapagos tortoise includes 15 subspecies, three of which are extinct. The rest are declared by the International Union for Conservation of Nature to be vulnerable or in critical condition.
Faced with these threats, steps to conserve this species have been taken in recent decades. Since 1965, more than 10,000 young sea turtles have been released into the wild, according to the Galapagos Conservatory.
In April, four baby Galapagos tortoises were born at the Philadelphia Zoo to centenarian parents, a first for an American wildlife park.
The species continues to be protected in France and in June 2024, Darwin, a giant tortoise specimen of the species was born in a Corsican zoo.
