Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

I finally did what I've wanted to do ever since I got my time-lapse movie gadget.

I spent a nice, warm, Spring day at the San Diego Zoo watching the Galápagos Tortoises while the camera snapped picture after picture.

The Zoo has two recently renovated enclosures for their herds of turtles tortoises. The males and females are segregated. As you know from your reading about Galápagos Tortoises, the various islands of the archipelago host different subspecies of tortoises and they don't want hybrids. So they put males and females of the same subspecies together when the time is right. In the meantime they're kept apart so accidents don't happen.

I got to the Zoo just when they opened and headed straight for the tortoises. I set the camera up at the females' enclosure. The gals were spread around their enclosure. The guys were all clumped up at the near wall so I figured they might not show up well. I set the camera to take a shot every four seconds.

After 50 minutes of filming the females I had to take a break. Nature was calling and I had to answer. They had kind of settled down so it seemed a good time to switch enclosures anyway.

After my brief break I set the camera up at the corner of the males' enclosure. I kept shooting every four seconds. They're in a rather large enclosure and I was using my fisheye lens so I was worried that the tortoises in the distance would be mere dots. It turns out that they show up pretty well wherever they are in the enclosure, at least when they're moving. And move they do. Sped up by in the video they are absolutely hyperactive. But inert at times. At one point they all took a siesta. I thought I was I was not going to get any more action. But after their little naps they perked up and romped around the enclosure again.

The frames of this video were shot every four seconds (15 frames each minute) and played back at 15 frames per second. That speeds the action by a factor of 60.