Club Advisor's Column: Three Turtles and a Door That Shouldn't Have Opened

When I was a child, we had three turtles. A midorigame, a zenigame, and a zōrigame — that’s what we called them. Now that I’m the one building a turtle encyclopedia, I’ve learned that “midorigame” is the pet-shop name for baby red-eared sliders, “zenigame” almost certainly meant a young Reeves’s turtle, and “zōrigame” is a folk name that appears in no field guide at all — probably a grown Reeves’s turtle. My three different turtles may have been two species all along. (The whole naming tangle is in our Dictionary of Turtle Names.)

One summer, my family spent a week traveling in Hokkaido. When we came home, the tank was empty.

To this day I don’t know how they got out. There was a lid. And even granting the tank, I cannot explain the route from there to outside the house. But the turtles were gone, and no amount of searching indoors turned them up.

Some time later, a neighbor told us: there was a turtle on the road. It had been hit by a car.

I’m an adult now, and that feeling is still exactly as sad as it was. People call turtles slow — but give one a week, and it will leave a tank, leave a house, and reach a road. I know this the way you only know things that happened to you.

That is why this site has an article about escapes: walls two to three shell-lengths high, lids fastened rather than placed, a full enclosure audit before any long trip. Everything I wish someone had told the child version of me.

As the club’s advisor, scrolling through 367 species one by one, I sometimes catch myself thinking: maybe I’ll live with a turtle again. If I do, I’ll go in knowing everything — the decades-long commitment, the escape artistry, all of it. That’s what those three turtles taught me.

— The Club Advisor