Another strange turtle freak from the peculiar website that Fleur found... This Yellow Belly was that one in a million born with two heads.
It was born in June, and has been doing very well ever since.
It is well past the early fragile stage. The head on the turtle's left is the dominant one.
Both heads feed and move independently.
Considering it's extreme rarity, special care should be 
given to be sure the turtle is set up in an easily navigated, turtle-friendly environment.
The keeper who orders this turtle will truly have something very special....
I am in a moral conundrum here. On one side I think that there is something very morally dubious about selling lusus naturae to people as pets. The whole ethos of responsible pet keeping as promoted by our magazine The Amateur Naturalist is that when wild animals are kept in captivity it should be as a celebration of the diversity of wildlife in the world, and in as natural a habitat as possible. This is the most un-natural wild animal that one could possibly hope for.
But golly, I want one.
http://www.theturtlesource.com/turtle_subcat.asp?id=125698412
Now, there are ethics involved in choosing and deliberately breeding for deformity.
ReplyDeleteIt's more of an issue in my main area of zoological expertise-- the domestic dog. We have breed standards that call for all sorts of unnatural and unhealthy shapes, which, while "cute" and "bizarre," can also be rather detrimental to the animal's health.
And just this past week, a huge row erupted over a five-legged puppy.
http://www.wpix.com/news/wpix-five-legged-pup-now-has-four-legs,0,4610933.story
She couldn't walk properly or sit down. Now, this may have been a somatic mutation and not something one can actually use to establish a line.
Currently, there are big fights over albino dobermanns, which tend to have lots medical conditions, and breeding merles to merles, which can produce eye and ear deformities in 1/4 of the offspring that are bred from such "double merle" breedings.
These two headed turtles aren't as severely affected in living their lives as dogs are, but I still think there is an animal welfare issue.