Recently, a “two-headed” tortoise at the Geneva Museum of Natural History reached the remarkable age of 25, thanks to constant care by his handlers:

Janus also has two hearts, two pairs of lungs, and two distinct personalities.

Sometimes the heads wish to go in different directions.

“The right head is more curious, more awake, it has a much stronger personality,” Angelica Bourgoin, who leads the turtle’s care team, said. “The left head is more passive and loves to eat.” 

NEWS, “TWO-HEADED TORTOISE JANUS CELEBRATES 25TH BIRTHDAY” AT DW (SEPTEMBER 3, 2022)

How Could the Tortoise Heads Have Different “Personalities”?

Janus — despite the single name given — seems to be a set of conjoined tortoise twins. (Here’s a human example.) The handlers acknowledge that survival in the wild would be unlikely. For one thing, both heads can’t retract into the shell.

So it’s not surprising that the two heads would have different personalities — except insofar as a tortoise or turtle has any personality at all. And it turns out that they are smarter than we used to think.

For example, researchers have shown that some can learn. Here’s the abstract from a 2019 paper:

Relatively little is known about cognition in turtles, and most studies have focused on aquatic animals. Almost nothing is known about the giant land tortoises. These are visual animals that travel large distances in the wild, interact with each other and with their environment, and live extremely long lives. Here, we show that Galapagos and Seychelle tortoises, housed in a zoo environment, readily underwent operant conditioning and we provide evidence that they learned faster when trained in the presence of a group rather than individually. The animals readily learned to distinguish colors in a two-choice discrimination task. However, since each animal was assigned its own individual colour for this task, the presence of the group had no obvious effect on the speed of learning. When tested 95 days after the initial training, all animals remembered the operant task. When tested in the discrimination task, most animals relearned the task up to three times faster than naïve animals. Remarkably, animals that were tested 9 years after the initial training still retained the operant conditioning. As animals remembered the operant task, but needed to relearn the discrimination task constitutes the first evidence for a differentiation between implicit and explicit memory in tortoises. Our study is a first step towards a wider appreciation of the cognitive abilities of these unique animals.

GUTNICK, T., WEISSENBACHER, A. & KUBA, M.J. THE UNDERESTIMATED GIANTS: OPERANT CONDITIONING, VISUAL DISCRIMINATION AND LONG-TERM MEMORY IN GIANT TORTOISES. ANIM COGN 23, 159–167 (2020). HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.1007/S10071-019-01326-6 THE PAPERREQUIRES A FEE OR SUBSCRIPTION.

According to the authors, the tortoises share resources in the wild.

Read the rest at Mind Matters News, published by Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.