We often look to celebrity couples either to make our own relationships look stable or, less often, as models of remarkable love and odds-defying longevity. Think of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, Oprah and Steadman, Freddie Prinze Jr and Sarah Michelle Gellar. They’ve all been together so long, you can’t imagine them being apart, right?
They have nothing on Bibi and Poldi, however.
Bibi and Poldi’s relationship had all the makings of a love for the ages, quite literally.
The pair of giant Galapagos tortoises are so old that details of their early lives aren’t clear, but they both hatched in about 1897 and grew up together. Sometime in the Roaring Twenties, they took it to the next level, becoming mates.
Their relationship was certainly tested by time, but it survived World War II.
And much, much more. In the 1970s, Bibi and Poldi were moved to their current home, the Reptilienzoo Happ in Austria. They were inseparable, even sleeping shell-to-shell. It was like that for about 90 years.
It changed on a dime. It seemed that one day in November 2011, Bibi just got tired of Poldi.
She made her feelings pretty clear, hissing at him and biting off a chunk of his shell. The zookeepers had little choice but to separate them, but they didn’t give up on trying to re-ignite their love. What’s a good love story without some reconciliation, after all?
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The zookeepers went to great lengths to try to patch things up between the pair.
They set up dates over tasty tomatoes and tried some bonding games, to no effect. An artist made up a realistic plastic female tortoise and put it in with Poldi, hoping he’d take to it and make Bibi jealous. It fooled Poldi for a few days, but ultimately that failed too.
Eventually the zoo just had to accept that the 90-year affair was simply at an end.
The experts were stumped. “We get the feeling they can’t stand the sight of each other anymore,” the zoo’s director, Helga Happ, told The Austrian Times . “They are both 115 years old – they have been together since they were young and grew up together, eventually becoming a pair. But for no reason that anyone can discover they seem to have fallen out, they just can’t stand each other.”
It seems odd for a split between two tortoises to grab headlines, but Bibi and Poldi’s did.
As it so often does, Time summed up the reason why so many people were interested in these two giant tortoises’ marital spat: “If these turtles can’t make it work, what hope do the rest of us have?”
For its part, The New York Daily News put out a few theories as to why Bibi might have decided she was done with Poldi.
“Lack of personal space. The turtles have lived in the same cage for the last 36 years at the Austrian Zoo,” they suggested . Or maybe it was that “After 115 years together, what isn’t there to argue about?” Perhaps “It was time to branch out from one another. Giant turtles can live to be nearly 200 years old.” Or maybe it was that old Hollywood divorce classic, “Irreconcilable differences. Simple as that.”
Seven years later, Bibi and Poldi remain apart.
The zoo has built them separate enclosures, but they hold out hopes that one day, the two might want to get together again. Their tortoise condos share a wall, but there’s a little window they can see each other through.
However, any attempts to reconcile still seem pretty far off.
Whenever they’re out for a romp in the grass and Bibi catches sight of Poldi, “she hisses like a snake,” Helga says, according to Atlas Obscura. “She does not want to live with him.”
