The St. Helena 5 pence coin shows Jonathan, a roughly 190 year old tortoise (de.numista.com)

berlam 12 hours ago

• binaryturtle 9 hours ago

  Shouldn't it be easy to attach a sensor at the belly of the turtle that alarms staff when it happens. Sounds like an actual no-brainer use for modern technology.

  • dieselgate 4 hours ago

    I raised market-sheep when I was younger and during breeding the ram wears a harness with colored chalk on the underside. You then have visual cues for which ewes are likely to become pregnant.

  • jyounker 6 hours ago

    That would probably really piss the tortoise off. Imagine if your ass was made out of bone, and someone glued a lego to it. Sitting down would be a nightmare.

    • TomatoCo 4 hours ago

      I wonder why not glue it to the top? Somewhere unobtrusive.

      • busymom0 3 hours ago

        Could also put one of the thrusters from SpaceX rockets (or the roadster now) to automatically turn it right side up if it happens.

• whyage 9 hours ago

  How did these animals survive as a species for millions of years with this flip-over bug in their genes? Why hasn't evolution solved it, for example, by eliminating flip-prone individuals from the gene pool and giving better survival chances to those who can right themselves?

  • jyounker 6 hours ago

    > How did these animals survive as a species for millions of years with this flip-over bug in their genes?

    Whether or not they can right themselves depends upon the terrain. Falling over can be a fatal experience for humans too.

    > Why hasn't evolution solved it, for example, by eliminating flip-prone individuals from the gene pool and giving better survival chances to those who can right themselves?

    Evolution is all about trade-offs. Being big makes it hard to right yourself, but it also makes you much harder to flip. It probably also probably makes you much hotter to potential mates.

  • jyounker 6 hours ago

    The web is a wonderful place: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/giant-tortoise-galapag...

  • bragr 8 hours ago

    You're assuming natural selection selects for not flipping over, when in reality, it selects for the winner of the shell flipping contest as presumably without intervention, the flipped tortoise does not breed, while the winning tortoise does (or at least still has the opportunity to)

  • yieldcrv 6 hours ago

    They reproduce before it happens and the brood sizes are too numerous to select against that

  • notatoad 9 hours ago

    Evolution can’t compete with Joe Hollins

• hilsdev 11 hours ago

  Life would be so much more magical and special if attempting to penetrate your mate could result in a slow death of dehydration and starvation, if not being torn to shreds by a passing bird of prey.

  • hilsdev 11 hours ago

    Although these days sometimes women will post your text messages on twitter, which may in fact be worse

    • jyounker 6 hours ago

      If women are posting men's text messages on twitter it's usually because the text messages are horrifying.

    • Insanity 11 hours ago

      If they do, you dodged a bullet lol.

  • fmajid 7 hours ago

    Praying mantises are far swifter.

wand3r 5 hours ago

• f33d5173 5 hours ago

  Cloudflare has no part in this beyond providing the technology. There are various alternative "security check" pages that are used by others; cloudflare's is the best of the bunch IMO, though still annoying.

  This page isn't cloudflare's, cloudflare stopped using google's captcha some years ago. It says ray id at the bottom, idk what's up with that, but it's clearly different.

  • wand3r 5 hours ago

    I got banned on cloudflare yesterday for refreshing the a page too many times during a failed "human check" and am still bitter about it. You are 100% correct though, this isn't cloudflare. I still stand by the point though. Having massive consolidation in the space is dangerous.

    • syshyk 4 hours ago

      You'll have to ask your AI to keep trying and find a way, then report back the article.

dang 7 hours ago

• gnabgib 7 hours ago

  I can't find the originals (flagged out of Algolia?) but this story was interesting.. slight tangent Oldest known tortoise still alive, as reports of death revealed as hoax (6 points, 7 months ago - but there's healthy discussion somewhere, think the original news was 2026-04-01) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47620163

mberning 11 hours ago

• bruce511 11 hours ago

  St Helena has "recently" (inside last decade) got an airport and a weekly service from Johannesburg, South Africa via Walvis Bay, Namibia.

  Before that it was only accessible via an infrequent ship which took 3 days out of Cape Town, South Africa.

  But given the air link it is a lot more accessible now.

  Tristan is still only accessible via sea, and even if you make it there, there's no guarantee you can land. There is no port, so ship-to-land transfers are via small boat, so the whole process is very weather dependent.

  Both islands though have a really interesting history, and are well worth reading about, even if you never get there.

  And these days you can get a flavor of local life via the local newspaper online. https://sthelenaonline.org/st-helena-independent/

  • trallnag 11 hours ago

    Always like to scroll through available properties in such remote places

• nephihaha 7 hours ago

  I'd like to see Ascension Island too, but it is apparently quite restricted.

nephihaha 7 hours ago

brcmthrowaway 11 hours ago

• forkerenok 10 hours ago

  Yes, this is mentioned a couple of times in the article and in Jonathan's birthday song featured in one of the videos on the page. :)

  • brcmthrowaway 9 hours ago

    Jesus, they did things differently back then

Razengan 12 hours ago