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BROWNSVILLE — There are a few key elements to throwing a birthday party: a cake, guests and of course, the age of the birthday boy or girl.
So when someone hits the big 100, you have to throw out all the stops, which is just what Gladys Porter Zoo did Saturday for Houston, a female Galápagos tortoise and longtime zoo resident. To do things in style, zoo staff decorated the habitat Houston shares with her six roommates with a banner, present boxes and a special three-tiered “cake” made with primate biscuits, veggies, cactus and other tortoise-safe foods with cactus candles forming a 100.
She also received a throng of well-wishers to serenade her with the traditional “Happy Birthday” song as she, with some help from her fellow Galápagos tortoises, made short work of her birthday cake. Her party attendees got a treat of their own with free Kona Ice snow cones as a party favor.
Galápagos tortoises are a long-lived endangered species that can grow as old as 150 to 200 years. Known for their large size, females clock in at around 300 to 500 pounds and males at 500 to 800 pounds. These giants are native only to the Galápagos Islands off the coast of South America.
Houston is one of the biggest females of the herd at the zoo, at 353 pounds, and for Associate Curator of Reptiles Ashley Ortega, a personal favorite when performing demonstrations for the zoo’s younger visitors due to her calm temperament and sociability.
“She just prefers to be with people than with food. So you can drop food in there, but she is just more interested in who is in the yard,” Ortega said.
So how did Houston, the friendly female giant, come to be chomping down on a birthday cake in Brownsville, over 2,000 miles from home? The answer starts nearly a century ago and involves the New York Aquarium, an extinction problem and an expedition.
In 1928, Dr. Charles H. Townsend, the Director of the New York Aquarium, led an expedition to the Galápagos Islands with a mandate — to remove 182 Galápagos tortoises from the island and establish a breeding population to save the tortoises, which were decimated due to their popularity as a fresh on-ship food source for sailing and whaling vessels. The removed tortoises would be distributed to zoos, primarily in the United States, to bolster their population and prevent the spread of the extinction event Townsend saw already occurring on some of the islands.
Townsend could only take younger tortoises that weighed under 90 pounds, one of which was Houston, a female of the Volcan Darwin Galápagos Tortoise species. After the expedition, she found her new home, and name, at the Houston Zoo in the same year.
Fast forward to 1985, when she entered Gladys Porter Zoo as part of the zoo’s Galápagos tortoise breeding program. The zoo is one of the leading institutions for breeding this tortoise species and ensuring their continued existence, in which Houston has played a vital role over the years.
Now no one knows exactly how old she was when Townsend’s expedition transported her off the island, though estimates put her hatching date at around 1923.
How she came to be in the United States introduces the one tiny wrinkle in celebrating a native Galápagos tortoise’s birthday. No one knows for sure when she hatched.
There’s something to say about cultivating an air of mystery as the grand dame of the zoo, and if Houston knows her exact age, she has kept it to herself.
“Their shells do have growth lines on them, but it is not really like a tree where you can count them and figure out how old they are,” Ortega said.
So curators like Ortega have to go off records kept over the decades factoring in her size at the time of the expedition to give them a rough idea of how old she is to pick a day to celebrate her general, if not specific, age. Ortega picked Saturday since it is roughly in the middle of what is estimated to be Houston’s 100th year.
“We assume Houston is 100 years old, but she could be older than that,” Ortega said.
As a member of this long-lived species, Houston has many happy returns ahead of her and the possibility that one day the zoo staff of the future will throw another celebration, this time for her 200th birthday. But for this birthday, at this moment in time, Houston is enjoying the present and eating her cake, 100 years young.
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