20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Uncovering the secret lives of turtles, we also discover ourselves
I am playing the world's slowest video game.
Sitting in front of a monitor with a technician from the Smithsonian, I am watching the progress of Turtle 4004, known as Roxy. She's an older box turtle, and a GPS tag on her shell records hourly updates of her location.
But box turtles, on average, move only about 2 centimeters per hour — which makes for some obvious tedium for those tracking her progress. The tech reads out updates on Roxy's peregrinations to me.
