After 50 Years of Living Alone, Turtle Gets a Friend
For nearly 50 years, an eastern box turtle named Rockalina lived alone on a linoleum kitchen floor. When she was rescued last year by New Jersey turtle sanctuary Garden State Tortoise, she was wan, her eyes covered in dead skin, her claws unnaturally bent upward.
It was learned that Rockalina had been taken from the wild in the 1970s by a New York boy, and she ended up on a kitchen floor living mostly on cat food for five decades. After months of rehab at the sanctuary, the eastern box turtle looks a lot better and has something truly novel in her life: a turtle friend.
Rockalina now enjoys supervised outside time at the sanctuary, where she is touching grass and dirt for the first time in many years. In the effort to help Rockalina live more like a turtle, she was recently introduced to a baby of her species, a hatchling barely the size of a cookie.
“I had a feeling it was going to go well, and it did. And she instantly was curious,” sanctuary director Chris Leone tells NPR. “She walked with it. She almost seemed to stop and let it get a little bit ahead of her. And they just sniffed each other. They shared a strawberry. It was a beautiful moment.”
Leone posted this video documenting the meet-cute, in which he explains that the hatchling, now named Pebble, had been specially raised from conception to be a companion for Rockalina. Since they were unsure how the older turtle’s immune system would respond to fraternizing, they needed to know Pebble would not expose her to any germs.
So far so good. The sanctuary hopes to integrate more friends into Rockalina’s life – anything to more closely approximate a real turtle’s existence. In the wild, box turtles are not really solitary animals; they live in colonies or other loosely knit social groups.
Eastern box turtles (Terrapene carolina carolina) are listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Species Red List. Their numbers have declined due to habitat loss, traffic collisions, and people collecting them as pets — as what happened to Rockalina. They can live up to 100 years in captivity.
Photo credit: Garden State Tortoise
