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This is no easy meal, then, and no mere opportunism. The tortoise is hunting like it knows what it’s doing, Gerlach says, backing the chick up until it reaches the edge of the log and the bird’s instincts tell it to go no further.
But is a tortoise’s digestive system even equipped to handle meat? “No one has looked at that at all,” says Gerlach. “They don't eat meat—why would you bother looking?”
Still, since some degree of scavenging is common across herbivores, he thinks they must be able to extract amino acids and minerals from meat. After all, he says, animal protein is relatively easy to digest. “Digesting plant matter is the evolutionarily difficult thing to do,” he says, because plants are made of tough materials like cellulose.
What is a tragedy for one chick is in fact a promising sign for the birds of Frégate Island as a whole, says Gregory Pauly, curator of herpetology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, who wasn’t involved in the new paper. It means that birds are back, and tortoises are more than happy to take advantage. “Both tortoise numbers and bird numbers in this area had declined as a result of habitat destruction, introduced species such as rats and large grazing mammals, and exploitation by people,” he writes in an email to WIRED. “Thus, the opportunity to even observe predatory interactions like the one described wasn't even available until recently as the bird population rebounded with habitat restoration efforts.”
How many tortoises know how to hunt like this? How often do they do it? “We really don't know whether this is simply an interesting observation, or whether actually it's a really significant development in the ecology of the island's tortoises and also the island’s ecology,” Gerlach says. “So we're very much at the ‘lots of questions’ stage.”
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