I Chose Turtles to Teach Me
There is something quintessentially earthy about turtles. Perhaps it is that they are low and slow, although some can move quicker than we can; perhaps it is because they are generally silent, though some are quite vocal in love; perhaps it is because they are at once enduring and helpless, strong and weak, flighty and fierce, exploited but unknown. Perhaps it is that individually they live longer than we do and are therefore capable of perceiving the foolish foibles of each of our lives, though maybe it is more because, as a group, they arose before our own tree-shrew forebears, bore witness to the rise and fall of dinosaurs, and thus see our species in a geologic context we will never comprehend.
Turtles sometimes embody wisdom in literature, cartoons, television, and film, a wisdom born of both longevity and suffering. I look at them with both admiration and compassion, the first for their dogged, determined persistence, the second for their plight. Most folks don’t look to them at all. Rather, they unthinkingly destroy their habitats, eat them in soup, grind them into potions, drown them in fishing nets, and even purposely run them over on the road. It is the fact that most people will not even pause to dignify turtles with a glance that makes these denizens of Earth’s dark and unknown spaces such a perfect symbol of our dubious relationship with nature.
Turtles entered my life when I was nine years old and never left. I saw early on how a turtle in a pond or stream or river or sea could break water, take in what is going on above the surface, and then dive back down to a secret, but fundamental, world that human beings would never know. I envied them that ability—which for humans requires discipline, devotion, effort, and qualified guidance through esoteric waters, but for turtles comes naturally and with neither stress nor strain. I became fascinated with them. They connected me to nature at a time when I lived in an apartment building in a concrete jungle whose only trees were planted in ordered rows and whose clouds were mostly punctured by the radio antennae on top of skyscrapers.
Some of the species of turtles I knew as a child growing up in a Manhattan apartment are now functionally extinct, and even those that persist are hardly common in the wild. At the time of this writing, turtles as a group are the most critically endangered of all vertebrates. Early on, I had no idea of the threat they were under and no sense of contributing to their demise by participating in a pet trade that mortally drained wild populations. I simply wanted to be with them, to feed them, change the dirty water in their tanks, and see them blink in evident pleasure at their renewed world, fresh, clean, and clear. I wanted to watch them chase crickets, devour earthworms, suck down fish by making a vacuum cleaner of their throats, scoot joyfully through the water, stick periscope-like noses up for a breath of air, then retreat again to hide under aquarium gravel. In tending to them, I partook in a respectful, natural exchange of energy with the panoply of nature’s other sentient beings. Now, after more than fifty years of working with individual turtles representing a third of Earth’s extant turtle species, I am stunned by how many have been lost and how precarious is the position of the few that remain.
In choosing to write about them in this book, I aim to help stem the tide against them and to draw upon an ancient tradition to help reframe the environmental, social, spiritual, and cultural problems turtles face. That tradition is Daoism, the religion in which I am a monk and which is perhaps the first coherent form of environmentalism. Turtles and Daoism became intertwined in Neolithic times in the part of the world later called China. In those early days, shamans—interlocutors between our world and the next—burned the bellies of river turtles with red-hot pokers until they cracked, then read the resulting lines the way back-alley fortune tellers now read cards or tea leaves.
In one legend of the late Neolithic period, right before the dawn of Chinese dynasties, a turtle arose from beneath the surface of the Luo river right in front of Fuxi, an analogue to the biblical Adam, revealing a combination of broken and unbroken lines that would later underpin the Yijing (I-Ching), the divinatory urtext of Chinese philosophical culture. In another similar tale, the legendary Emperor Yu, who is reputed to have ruled wisely and justly from c. 2123—2025 BCE, was supervising the building of a dam on the Yellow River when a giant turtle surfaced before him. This turtle, called Hi, bore a message on its back:
| 4 | 9 | 2 |
| 3 | 5 | 7 |
| 8 | 1 | 6 |
When Yu took a closer look, he realized that the numbers in the square had a specific property, namely that in every direction, they added up to fifteen. This diagram is important in feng shui, an art used all over Asia to design and build homes, offices, buildings, gardens, and even cities so as to best potentiate stability, prosperity, health, fecundity, wealth, longevity, and material riches. Today, stone turtles, often with stone snakes on their backs, greet visitors in Daoist temples all over Asia, and real live turtles swim in Daoist temple ponds.
Turtles are reptiles. That means they are related to snakes and lizards and, more distantly, to crocodilians, but they are far from slimy-skinned amphibians like salamanders and frogs. They reproduce by copulation and internal fertilization, lay eggs, and can have quite elaborate courtship rituals. Most are love-‘em and leave-‘em types, but some stay around to protect their offspring. Like other reptiles, they have lungs, not gills, and possess a bony spinal column and senses that are familiar to us, along with a couple that aren’t. Among the latter are the ability to detect electrical activity in water, to pick up vibrations in the ground using their shells, and perhaps the ability to sense specific airborne chemicals, especially pheromones.
Turtles are also poikilotherms, meaning that they depend upon external sources for the heat needed by their metabolic processes. They can be cold to touch when that heat is not forthcoming, leading to the misnomer “cold-blooded.” Actually, their blood can be warmer than ours—whilst basking in the desert sun, for example—and in certain situations, some can even generate a little bit of their own body heat. Contrary to folklore, turtles are not particularly slow. Because of the limitations of their physiology, most are not able to sustain fast movement for long periods of time but can get up and move quickly in a short dash or swim. Giant sea turtles can even traverse entire oceans at a clip that only a high-speed submarine could match.
The turtle’s defining characteristic is its shell. In most turtles—we will meet some exceptions in the fables that follow—the shell’s surface layer is comprised of keratin, the same stuff as human fingernails and hair, and as the horn of a rhinoceros, too. This keratin is divided into sections called scutes, which are basically giant versions of the scales characteristic of all reptiles. The upper shell, the carapace, is joined on each side of the turtle to the lower shell, the plastron, by a bridge. Beneath the scutes lie bony plates that approximate but do not exactly match the scutes above them. One unique feature of the turtle skeleton is that the shoulder girdle is inside the rib cage. If we were built that way, we’d be able to bring our ribs up to our ears when we shrugged.
Turtle shells range in shape from flat and streamlined to domed and unwieldy, the better to discourage predators such as alligators and wild dogs from crushing them for a meal. Some turtle shells close up so completely that only the most powerful and persistent predator can get inside to the soft parts; others have shells that are quite reduced to facilitate climbing or crawling about in the mud. Turtles with less protective shells typically make up for their deficits with strong jaws, a sharp beak, and a nasty attitude.
Speaking of attitudes, most turtles get along, at least with each other, and can live in large communities of different species. They have some surprising abilities, too. A few can spend an entire winter under the frozen surface of a lake or pond, reducing their heartbeats to nearly undetectable levels, and extracting what little oxygen they need through skin in their throat folds or urogenital area. The North American red-eared slider, Trachemys scripta elegans, has the most complex color vision system of any vertebrate, with seven different types of color-sensitive cone cells in the eye. Some turtles, while not nearly so eloquent and voluble as the ones we will encounter in the tales that follow, have a significant vocabulary. The Australian northern snake-necked turtle, Chelodina oblonga,