turtles

Okay, I am WAAAY too amused by this article: All but Ageless, Turtles Face Their Biggest Threat: Humans

It begins with:

This was no euphemistic brushoff, no reptilian version of “Sorry, I’ll be busy that night washing my hair.” Paddling around in a tropically appointed pool at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, the husky female Gibba turtle from South America made all too palpable her disdain for the petite male Gibba that pursued her. He crawled onto the parqueted hump of her bark-brown shell. She shrugged and wriggled until he slipped off. He looped around to show her his best courtship maneuvers, bobbing his head, quivering his neck. She kicked him aside like a clot of algae and kept swimming.

“I feel sorry for the little guy,” said Jack Cover, a turtle specialist and the general curator of the aquarium. “He’s making no progress, she’s got zero interest in him, yet he just keeps coming back for more.”

And why not? The male Gibba may be clueless, he may at the moment have the sex appeal of a floating toupee, but he is a turtle, and, as a major new book and a wealth of recent discoveries make abundantly clear, turtles are built for hard times. Through famine, flood, heat wave, ice age, a predator’s inspections, a paramour’s rejections, turtles take adversity in stride, usually by striding as little as possible.

This is so incredibly dorky. But for some reason the "clot of algae" comment just really cracks me up. You know, I've just realized that I've blogged at least 3 times consecutively about being amused by stuff that isn't all that amusing. I think I need to get more sleep...