Manuela, a red-footed tortoise was recently discovered sequestered in a
small room some 30 years after she went missing. The shelled adventurer
disappeared in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1982. Although a lengthy
search was undertaken to find the family pet, she was never seen again.
Her owners, the Almeida family, figured she had ambled out after
builders left the front door open.
But when the patriarch of the family recently died, the children began
cleaning out a locked storage room. Along with broken electrical items
and other assorted objects that the elder Almeida had collected over the
years, the son found Manuela, alive, inside a box along with an old
record player.
“I put the box on the pavement for the rubbish men to collect, and a
neighbor said, ‘you’re not throwing out the turtle as well are you?’ ”
the younger Almeida told Brazil’s Globo website. “I looked and saw her.
At that moment, I turned white, I just couldn’t believe what I was
seeing.”
Much like snakes, turtles are able to endure lengthy periods of time
without food. Turtles in the wild can enter a state of suspended
animation by decreasing their body temperatures and other physiological
processes. But 30 years?
Jeferson Peres, a Rio-based veterinarian, told Globo that red-footed
tortoises have been known to go without eating for two to three years in
the wild. Even so, 30 years is unprecedented. He suggested that
Manuela, the turtle with moxie, survived by eating termites and other
small insects and licking condensation.
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