Lost pet tortoise found in family storeroom 30 years later

Leandro Almeida of Rio de Janeiro was cleaning out a storeroom at his family's home when a neighbor noticed a tortoise in a box meant for the trash. Turns out, the tortoise was Manuela, a family pet who they thought escaped back in 1982. From Edmonton Journal:

The red-footed tortoise feeds in the wild on fruit, leaves, feces and dead animals, a professor told Brazil's Globo.com, but can go up to three years without eating.
The family speculated that Manuela may have survived on termites while in the house.

"Family finds pet tortoise that was missing for 30 years as they clean out dead father's storeroom"

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

MORE: pet • tortoise

More at Boing Boing

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Hackers prepare for first "national holiday" in their honor

http://www.tavie.com Tavie

My HEART. Poor tortoise.

Gonna go home and hug my Chinese box turtle.*

*Not really, they don’t go for that. I’ll just sing to him.
Brainspore

“I was just taking a nap. Did I miss anything?”
Jason Martin

Title of article should state more clearly if turtle was found dead or alive. I had to click through 2 or 3 things to finally see that he was “reunited, and *remains* the family pet” – (ALIVE).
http://twitter.com/fractos Adam Christie

I like the idea of a tortoise “escaping”.
- James Penrose
  
  They do escape: I had one as a kid but it dug a hole under a fence and got away.
  
  We kept it in a very large backyard and so might go many days without seeing it, so when we noticed it was gone it have been half way down the block. :)
  - Brainspore
    
    Our neighbor’s tortoise did the same thing every once in a while. We’d sometimes find it upside-down in our yard after our labrador got tired of trying to play with it.
- Syn -
  
  Better tell that to Diego Maradona quick! He’ll make a footnote.
http://www.nothinginside.net mindysan33

Aw! That’s an awesome story! Let’s hear it for a slow metabolism!
- robotnik
  
  *clap* [45 minutes later] *clap* [etc.]
soylent_plaid

30 years as a stowaway in the storeroom? Go tortoise!

But then again, that means 30 years of tortoise poops. One wonders where he was going to the bathroom this entire time.
- Brainspore
  
  The red-footed tortoise feeds in the wild on fruit, leaves, feces…
  
  Huzzah! A self-cleaning pet!
showme

This mean guy lived in my neighborhood when I was a kid. One day he opened his door and there was a tortoise on his porch. The jerk picked it up and threw it as hard as he could!

About 5 years later there was a knock on his door. He opened it. It was the tortoise, who said, “What the hell was that for???!!!
- Jake Rennie
  
  I’m sorry I don’t call you more often, grandma.
Diederik Werken

Thirty years without water?
Yeah, that’s a likely story.
- Brainspore
  
  Termites are mostly water.
http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo

Wow, let’s hope tortoises aren’t subject to boredom.
- Brainspore
  
  (Snail finds its way into storeroom, moves gradually across floor, dies of dehydration in a corner, is consumed by ants, shell collects a thick layer of dust.)
  
  Tortoise: “What the fuck was THAT??”
anansi133

That sounds like a very lonely stretch of time.
- http://therandomtales.blogspot.com/ Luvnish A.T
  
  Zen tortoise has been meditating on the complexity of life the whole time…
  - Brainspore
    
    “We haven’t spoken to anyone else for thousands of years, so we started talking to ourselves.”
jennix

Tortoise says, “Augh. What is it now?”