Bones is FAAAABULOUS.

I know I haven’t posted for a while, but today, I caught Bones sleeping in an oddly hilarious pose, which was really unfortunate because I was drinking something at the time.

So, I present to you my very happy, somewhat flamboyant turtle:

Aww, yis. Dis is de life!

And while I’m at it, I figured I’d upload a few other photos for you guys, just to make it worth your while:

Oh! This is noms?

Am I pretty? Tell me I’m pretty. TELL ME I’M PRETTY.

This is NOT the noms I was promised!

HNNNNRRRRHGHGRHRHG!!!!

And, for anyone who’s interested, he’s now a hefty 3.5″ in (8.75 cm) long in the shell now! This should probably mean that he’ll get to puberty sometime next year and I’ll be able to tell what gender he actually is. Maybe. Turtles are finicky things and my gendering skills aren’t that great, but by the time he’s in the range of 4 – 5″, I should be able to figure it out.

Bones, I will laugh so hard if you’re a chick.

Bones’ adventure in the grass – picture dump

Following the trail left by a lawnmower.

Can you see me?

Ooh, pretty red things. …No, that’s just a weed.

Momma!

I’m floating!

MOMMA!!

Nooooo. Come back!

Hide!

You will save me, yes?

What is all of this squishy stuff?

So much squishy stuff!

Finally figured out who was making a mess of the tank

So, in order to plant the anacharis bulbs I got off of eBay, I was going to put them into some decorative shot glasses filled with colored marbles. The only problem was that somebody kept digging the marbles out of the glasses and scattering them all around the tank. I thought for the longest time that the culprit was Jim, who I’d seen digging around the plants and uprooting them, but as it turns out, Jim is completely innocent. 

I caught Bones red-pawed:

So I caught Bones sleeping with his eyes open…

To look at him, you’d have thought he was just the most chill turtle in the world, sitting there on his little floating platform with his head stuck out and his legs all tucked in, just watching you calmly. The complete picture of bliss. At one with his environment, totally okay with you and what you were doing. The kind of turtle you could put a little hat on or put on a skateboard. 

Nope. He was dead asleep. With his eyes open and his nose stuffed in the corner.

How do I know he’s not just a really chill turtle? Because normally, if he sees me, he freaks out and runs into the water and dives to the bottom of the tank, flailing frantically as he tries to hide behind a piece of driftwood or Spock (who looks like a piece of driftwood). This is his modus operandi. 

So, given that he was so completely zonked out, I decided to see how close I could get. Eventually, I was standing a foot away from him and he was still asleep, so I gave up.

And then not two minutes after I filmed that, he finally woke up, saw me sitting on the couch, and ran off of his platform fast enough that he knocked one of the outside magnets loose. Good job, Bones. This is why you can’t have nice things. 

Saw signs of a wounded animal

I was walking through the woods today and this is what I found:

What the. What is this stuff?

OMG. There’s more of it and it’s changing colors!

It sparkles! …OH NO. IT MUST BE UNICORN BLOOD!

Where is it? Where is it!?

Sure hope the unicorn escaped. Didn’t see any signs of her in the forest, so she must have gotten away from whatever attacked her.

Looked like one hell of a scuffle, though. Stay safe, little unicorn!

The things I’ve seen

So, I just passed by my tank only to notice that there was quite a commotion going on in it. Bones the Turtle and Spock the Pleco were chasing each other around.

Normally, this is because Spock is trying to get up on Bones’ shell and Bones doesn’t want that, so he tries to run away. This time, though, Bones was not running away. In fact, he was trying to get closer to Spock.

Now, I have witnessed Bones sit comfortably and let Spock suck on his shell to clean it off. That has become more frequent lately, but that’s not this was. No, this was a new breed of symbiosis:

Bones was after Spock’s poop trail.

That green thing, dangling around like a tasty worm every time Spock tried to get up on Bones’ shell absolutely tantalized the turtle and he kept crawling around, trying to get it, but then Spock would miss his shell and go after it, and then Bones would miss the poop and move, turning it into something akin to a dog chasing its own tail… if the tail were made of feces.

After a while, they got dizzy and stopped and then Spock went to feed on more algae and Bones went to scavenge along the bottom of the tank like he didn’t just try to eat someone’s poop before it was even all the way out of their ass.

Welcome to evolution.

Here’s Spock trying to clean Bones’ shell:

 

Here’s Bones trying to hunt Spock’s poop trail:

Bones scared the poop out of me

Yesterday, I got home from my regular jewelry-making trip to my parents’ house. This is the time that Bones gets his tasty food, which is usually some combination of shrimp, mealworms, carrots, and frozen juvenile turtle food (“tasty” is subjective).

At least, it is normally the time that Bones gets his tasty food. Problem was that there was no Bones.

WHERE IS THE TURTLE?!

No matter how much I searched the tank, high and low, through the plants and under the urn, there was no turtle. The turtle was gone. Missing. Turtlenapped? My only clue was the burnt-out bulb of the heat lamp.

Thoughts raced through my head. Did someone steal my turtle?! Why would they steal only Bones and not Spock? IS SPOCK NOT WORTHY? 

“Calm down, Jessica,” I told myself as my rational brain started to kick in. The door had been locked when I’d gotten home and nobody but me had keys. The patio door had also been locked and my Xbox 360 was still in the living room. Surely somebody would not steal my cute turtle and neglect something more valuable.

So then where had the turtle gone? Frantically, I started searching around the tank. No turtle. Surely he hadn’t crawled out. How would he have gained a foothold against the glass walls? He’s not actually a ninja, or so I’d thought. I realized quickly that a corner of Bones’ Privacy Tea Towel was hanging into the tank low enough that he’d have been able to reach it and pull himself out.

My turtle was a ninja. He could climb walls! But then the question was… How had he fared with the four-foot drop on the other side? A mighty large drop for such a small turtle.

My frantic search resumed. I crawled worm-style on the floor, getting my viewpoint as low as possible so that I could peer under every piece of furniture that I owned. He wasn’t under the table or the coffee table or the couch. He wasn’t under my plant stand or my shelving or behind my entertainment center. He wasn’t in the storage room or in the closet. He wasn’t anywhere! I couldn’t find him!

But then I started thinking, “If I were a turtle, I would look for somewhere warm and dark. Somewhere to hide.” So I surveyed the living room again. Eventually, I found this nook:

This is my “craft corner”. It’s where I keep various craft supplies for the projects I have planned. It’s also just about as far away from any of the ceiling vents as one could get and also a dark place. I lifted up the bag, and magically, there was my turtle, tucked in his shell and sleeping.

Oh man. That was a relief, let me tell you. I picked him up and he just looked at me like, “what?” He was perfectly fine, if perhaps a little cooler than he wanted to be, so I returned him to the nice, warm water of his tank and promptly gave him some worms, which he gobbled down enthusiastically.

I don’t get what the problem was. I was just looking for my medkit.

He is completely unrepentant. All this after I even bought him some plants to go in his tank (those rooty things in the pink flower. They will need a few days to get going, I was told). I’ve taken away his privacy screen to prevent future turtle adventures, so he’s just going to have to get used to seeing me all the time. It’s your own damn fault, Bones.

Still don’t see what the problem was.

Today, I’ll be heading down to get another heat lamp for him, as the old bulb actually cracked when it burnt out. I wonder if maybe it made a loud sound that scared Bones? Or maybe he just got cold. I don’t even know. Goddamn turtle, scaring the hell out of me. Thanks for that.

In other news, I finally got a picture of Jim, The Fish That Lived:

Sometimes, Jim comes over and cleans Spock off. I don’t know what he thinks he’s cleaning, but Spock just stoically sits there and lets the captain pick at him.

This is what happens when I put a piece of Spock’s food in the tank. EVERYBODY wants it. Poor Spock. Bones and Jim don’t even like it.

I call this the Stack of Star Trek. Bones, Jim, and Spock, all in a line! Jim is playing the referee here.

So, I suppose that’s a bit of good news! Jim is still alive and getting bigger, so he’s probably out of danger of being eaten now.

Still, though, I just know that every time I check the tank for the next month, I’m going to be making sure the turtle is actually in it.

Photo Dump!

I borrowed my dad’s old camera so I could take some photos of Bones and Spock. My phone is a POS, and therefore so is the camera on it, so this is a big improvement!

I also wanted to show how much bigger Bones has gotten! He almost fills up my palm now, which means he’s just shy of 2.5″ (6 cm). He was just over an inch when I got him, so he’s more than doubled in size! I’ve had him for 10 months, and as far as I’m aware, he’s well within the parameters for what he should be at this age. He’s even started shedding his old scutes because he’s completely grown new ones under them.

“What is this thing? Why are you pointing it at — OH GOD.”

As he’s gotten bigger, he’s lost some of the vibrancy of the yellow on his shell.

“Talk to the hand.”

He was very patient (kind of) with all my picture-taking. By this point, he was getting antsy and flailing to get away.

I also took some pictures of Spock, mainly because his patterning is beautiful. The last pictures I took of him weren’t particularly clear.

Look at all of this poop. It’s in a huge pile under him. SO MUCH POOP.

What beautiful spots, Spock!

Ever seen the inside of a turtle?

I stumbled across a really amazing Japanese artist who preserves and dyes tiny creatures to make them like rainbow, transparent skeletons. They’re absolutely amazing. What really caught my eye was his turtle:

Look at all the detail!

Though it’s sad that this little turtle died, he’s been turned into something so beautiful. You can see how his ribs turn into his shell and all the tiny vertebrae in his tail and toes. Absolutely amazing.

You can see more of the work here: http://www.designboom.com/art/iori-tomita-new-world-transparent-specimens/

And in a piece of unrelated news, Spock is still pooping. I did an internet search to make sure that was normal and the general consensus is “welcome to the world of owning a pleco”.

Spock is a Clean Freak

So, Bones has a little floating platform in the corner of the tank that he likes to bask on when he’s not freaking out about various things. It’s his relaxation spot, like a beach for him to stretch out on and fan his toes out, as you may remember from a previous post.

Now, the problem with this floating island is that it also gets algae on it. I have seen, on occasion, Spock trying to climb up on it, sucker mouth flapping away, but he just can’t reach the tasty green stuff that he wants so badly. It’s so sad and pathetic, watching him clinging to the edge of it, able to see the luscious paradise just an inch away and being completely unable to evolve the limbs and lungs necessary to work his way up to it.

So, I brought the algae down to him. I weighted the island down to the bottom of the tank and Spock absolutely freaked out in stoic joy. He latched onto that platform and spent two hours cleaning it.

Om nom nom.

OM NOM NOM NOM.

Spock was as happy as a Vulcan-fish could possibly be, but I don’t think Bones was too terribly impressed. He hid at the bottom of the tank and just looked up at me as if I’d betrayed him by calling him out on just how messy his room really was.

“I hate you so much right now.”

Though it is somewhat ineffective because he can’t actually crane his neck back far enough to look at me, so he has to stare at me through the reflection on the glass. Otherwise, I’d probably have turned to stone from the patented McCoy Death Glare. Medusa would break eye contact first.

But, the evil deed is done and Bones’ room is clean and Spock is making another Green Mile for me to scoop out later. Life in the tank has returned to normal.