Jonathan beats out the oldest living person by nearly 70 years–a lifetime!
Jonathan is the world’s oldest tortoise. He lives at the governor’s plantation on St. Helena Island, a island off the coast of southwestern Africa that is a British overseas territory.
Jonathan is believed to have been born in 1832 on the island of Seychelles, off the east coast of Africa. He arrived on St. Helena in 1882, at the age of 50, and has called the island home ever since.
Jonathan is one of five tortoises living on the plantation, but far outdates his friends. The average lifespan of a Seychelles Great Tortoise is about 150 years.
With age, Jonathan has begun to lose some of his senses, including his sight and smell, and for a while his beak became blunt due to a lack of nutrients. His lack of sight and smell made it difficult for him to detect food, which may have led to his malnutrition.
However, a few years ago Joe Hollins, the island’s head veterinarian, began treating him with a new diet and special attention, according to the Seychelles News Agency. He would hand feed Jonathan so that the tortoise wouldn’t have to search for food, like twigs. National Geographic reports he’s now fed apples, carrots, cucumbers, bananas and guava.
On December 7, 2015, Hollins wrote a blog entry about Jonathan’s miraculous health improvement:
Jonathan is alive and well! I fed him yesterday as I do every Sunday, and his appetite was vigorous. He’s blind from cataracts, has lost his sense of smell, and so cannot detect food (his fellow giants mug me and can detect the tiniest morsel dropped on the ground), but he has retained excellent hearing.
I literally hand feed him with gloves (welder’s gauntlets!). He knows my voice and so starts mouthing the air for food and I place it so that he bites off chunks as he has no idea where it is. This works well.
There is a chance that he’ll either drop dead tomorrow or live until he’s 250 and see us all off. The feeding has improved him surprisingly. His once blunt and crumbly beak has become sharp and lethal, so he was probably suffering from microdeficiencies of vitamins, minerals and trace elements.
Credit: Flikr
