An elderly woman found two baby turtles joined at the abdomen. They were alive and fully formed.
Chris Leone, a 44-year-old herpetologist and director of Garden State Tortoise in New Jersey, has seen it all. Even so, he called Flip and Flop “something extraordinary”. He knew that for them to have a chance of surviving long-term, they would have to be separated. But they were so small that imaging tests couldn’t be performed, so no one knew which organs they shared.
Along with veterinarian Chris Lambert, he chose the slower approach: placing sutures between them to gradually separate the tissue that connected them. After the third one, they were free. Flip survived. Flop didn’t, and Leone admits there’s no way to know for certain why. His hypothesis is that they shared organs that were vital to her.
Today, Flip’s progress is, in his words, “simply extraordinary”: Flip swims, dives, sunbathes, and eats. Flip even shares an aquarium with another turtle named Nemo.