I’m sure we can all agree that hippos might be one of the last animals you’d want to cross paths with on a normal day – and that’s without taking into consideration that they might actually be inclined to eat you and not just trample/smash/crush/maw you to death.

Yet hippos aren’t the only herbivores that might order off of the carnivore menu from time to time. New footage has recently emerged of a Seychelles giant tortoise actively ‘chasing’ (as much as a tortoise can pursue), killing and eating a baby bird.

A write up of the behaviour as well as video clip can be found in the below article by Anna Zora and Justin Gerlach.

Giant tortoises hunt and consume birds

Tanya Strydom is a PhD student at the Université de Montréal, mostly focusing on how we can use machine learning and artificial intelligence in ecology. Current research interests include (but are not limited to) predicting ecological networks, the role species traits and scale in ecological networks, general computer (and maths) geekiness, and a (seemingly) ever growing list of side projects. Tweets (sometimes related to actual science) can be found @TanyaS_08.