Tortoises are slow. While most of Earth’s creatures zip around — feeling, doing, acquiring, discarding, destroying — tortoises mosey at glacial speeds.
A Galápagos tortoise maxes out at about 0.15 miles an hour, roughly 1/20th as fast as a human typically walks. And forget about falcons, cheetahs and sailfish: They are in another world altogether.
But tortoises get the last laugh. As members of the other species each take their last breath, the tortoise keeps chugging along, year after year after year.
But now Gramma, a Galápagos tortoise, has eaten her last cactus fruit, the San Diego Zoo reported.
She arrived in San Diego between 1928 and 1931, the zoo said, when she was roughly in her 40s. The zoo’s best guess is that she was 141 when she died on Thursday.
She was “sweet and shy,” the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance said in a statement. Her care specialists had referred to her as “the queen of the zoo.”
She was euthanized after suffering “ongoing bone conditions related to advanced age,” the zoo said.
While creatures like coral and sponges can live thousands of years, tortoises are at the top for ambulatory creatures that you might see at a zoo.
And 141 is not a record for the species. A Galápagos tortoise named Harriet died at an Australian zoo in southeast Queensland in 2006 at 176.
The Galápagos are volcanic islands off the coast of Ecuador. The remarkable range of species native to the islands also includes Galápagos penguins, sea lions, hawks and iguanas. An 1835 trip to the island aboard the H.M.S. Beagle and a study of the flora and fauna there was a formative experience for Charles Darwin, who would go on to develop the theory of evolution.
Foremost among the islands’ creatures is the Galápagos tortoise. About 10,000 still reside there despite threats to their eggs from rats, dogs and cats brought to the islands by humans. They can grow to be six feet and weigh several hundred pounds.
In the late 1920s and early ’30s, when Gramma arrived in San Diego, Calvin Coolidge and then Herbert Hoover were in the White House, people were grooving to “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and others were packing cinemas to see “The Broadway Melody” and “All Quiet on the Western Front.”
In 1884, the best estimate for Gramma’s birth year, Grover Cleveland was president, and the notions of going to the movies or buying recorded music had yet to be developed.
Tortoises have a way of making news, if at their own pace.
In 1928, 109 of them arrived at the Bronx Zoo, part of a conservation effort because wild dogs and pigs in the Galápagos had been eating their eggs and young. In 2020, a particularly frisky centenarian tortoise on Santa Cruz Island in California was credited with helping save the species from extinction. In 2024, an escapee was caught on a highway in Arizona after a less-than-high-speed chase.
Advanced age is often a big part of the curiosity about such stories. In April, a 100-year-old Galápagos Tortoise at the Philadelphia zoo became a mother for the first time. (“They are about the size of a tennis ball, and they are pretty feisty, actually,” a zoo official said of the young.)
The oldest living tortoise, and indeed the oldest living land animal, is believed to be Jonathan, a Seychelles giant tortoise. who resides in Saint Helena in the south Atlantic. The best estimate is that he is over 190 years old.
Victor Mather, who has been a reporter and editor at The Times for 25 years, covers sports and breaking news.
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