125-yr-old Giant Galapagos Tortoise Breathes his Last in Zoo

Hyderabad: The city of Hyderabad on Saturday lost its oldest resident, Chanakya, who was aged 125 years.

Chanakya, a Galapagos giant tortoise, was also the oldest inmate of the Nehru Zoological Park in the city. To the best of the knowledge of his caretakers, Chanakya did not leave anyone behind, and he was so old that origins of his arrival in the city are lost in the mists of time.

The zoo, in a news release, announced the death of the tortoise, saying its life – that spanned three centuries going by its reported age – came to an end due to age-related complications. Chanakya had a number G1, and shared his enclosure with another of its kind, known as G2, which zoo officials said is 95-years-old.

“It was hard this morning when we realized he was dead,” said Dr Sunil S. Hiremath, the zoo curator. “The first time I saw this tortoise was when I was in high school and during a visit to Hyderabad, went to the zoo in 1996,” he said, recalling his memories of the tortoise.

The 125-year-old tortoise was off food for the past 10 days, zoo veterinarian Dr M.A. Hakeem said. The initial postmortem report revealed that the tortoise died due to multiple organ failure.

“I tried to hand feed Chanakya for about eight days but it simply would not eat anything even when offered its favourite food, carrot, sweet potato, and banana,” Syed Jahangir, animal keeper at the zoo, who looked after the tortoise for the last eight years, told Deccan Chronicle. “It also used to like soaked chana,” he said.

Jahangir, accompanied by another staffer of the zoo, discovered Chanakya dead on Saturday morning. “Every morning, we cleaned the animal house, and the small pool in which it would cool down. Today morning, when we went, it was not moving and we realised it had died,” he said.

With summer heat picking up, among the other things Jahangir did was to place a gunny sack on the shell of the tortoise and pour water on it every hour to keep the sack soaked, and help Chanakya stay cool, just as he did with the other 95-year-old Galapagos giant tortoise, G2.

Chanakya was a resident of the Nehru Zoological Park from its very inception in 1963, after a collection of animals from the Hyderabad zoo as it was then known and housed in Bagh-e-Aam – today’s Public Garden – was shifted to the new zoo.

No one is really sure where Chanakya first came from. May be it was donated to the zoo in Bagh-e-Aam, or someone got it in an animal exchange with another zoo, or maybe it was bought by the then zoo officials. But if the age of the now no more tortoise is anything to go by, then its life spanned three centuries, and the year it was born in, 1899, was the one when Lord Curzon was appointed as the Viceroy of India, Swami Vivekananda set up the Ramakrishna Mission in Calcutta, with the year also witnessing the birth of freedom fighter Uddham Singh.

On Saturday, it lumbered off this planet.