Tortoises too. I’ve lost so much time watching The Tortoise Whisperer feed cactus pads to Ike. Wonder whatever happened to that guy, he stopped making new videos.
My sister has a tortoise named Leonard and you’re right he loves his back scratches! Especially right above his tail on the shell it’s like extra sensitive there or something!
They have nerve endings in their shell that are INCREDIBLY receptive - to pain, to touch, or anything else. It's partly due to the fact they can't get scratches on their own, for sure, but to a turtle, getting a back scratch is like getting a full luxury spa treatment you paid $250 for. They basically feel every bristle.
Tbh i hate sea anemones more than barnacles but a dixie cup size barnacle still makes me wanna dry heave. The fact that animals can form fleshy living crusts over rocks is just blergh.
That fails to satisfy me, I'm just thinking of how much turtle shit is still floating in the water, if he can sweep up the sediment from the top of the tank that easy
what does the bottom of the tank look like/?? bad dreams, thats what.
Theres probably something that maintains and circulate clean water in the system while sucking up all unwanted prticles. theyre scrubbing sht to make it easy for that
Pool filters and skimmers do a great job removing stuff like that but it needs to be carried in the water not settled on the bottom for that to work. Same reason pools that don't get swam in regularly get funky faster than those that do.
I remember somebody who used to work at their local zoo telling about how they had this one big ol turtle that was a complete pest for scritches. The thing was that she was endangered and the zoo had a list of very specific people who were allowed to touch her and the poster wasn't on that list. So this big ass turtle would swim up to them while they were cleaning her enclosure, start bothering them for scritches, and get increasingly huffy and petulant when they had to ignore her.
"I would love to pet you but I caaaaaant, I'm soooorryyyyy"
Animals love stimulation. You should see how interested in stuff cows get when a new thing enters the pasture. In the wild they’d be stimulated by the constant fight for survival, but they still want to experience the world. There was a gorilla in a zoo, I believe, who started cleaning her enclosure after seeing the cleaners clean her enclosure so many times.
Once when visiting an aquarium, the staff was doing an ask the divers segment at one of the tanks and one of the turtles was an absolute menace and wouldn't leave the poor diver alone, she kept having to swim away only for the turtle to follow.
Meanwhile I have an uncle that had just picked up a turtle from the ground and asked me if I wanted turtle soup. I said no he then proceeded to smash it calling them pests. He was a rice paddy farmer.
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u/Dame_Niafer 4h ago
Good grief I had no idea they were such cute li'l pests! This is adorable!