Name: Diego the horny tortoise.
Age: About 100.
Appearance: Roughly 5ft (1.5 metres) long, weighs 80kg (12.5st), leathery skin, long neck, large shell on his back.
Occupation: Sex god.
He doesn’t sound like a sex god. They say the same thing about Rod Stewart, another leathery old survivor who drives the ladies wild.
What is Diego’s secret? Ebullience. He has “a big personality and is quite aggressive, active and vocal in his mating habits”, according to the US environmentalist James Gibbs, who has played a leading role in the conservation of giant tortoises in the Galápagos Islands.
Remind me where the Galápagos Islands are. In the Pacific, 600 miles west of Ecuador. Read your Darwin.
I take it Diego has been part of the conservation effort. His part has been in every sense enormous.
Go on. In the 1970s, his species, Chelonoidis hoodensis, which is native to Española Island in the Galápagos, was down to its last 14 survivors in the wild. It was on its last stubby little legs, and threatening to follow several other giant Galápagos tortoise species into exctinction.
Call for Diego! Exactly. He had been sunning himself in San Diego zoo in California for 30 years after being taken from Española for scientific research, but in 1976 was returned to a breeding centre on Santa Cruz, one of the larger islands in the Galápagos. Since then, Diego has produced an estimated 800 offspring, making him an international sex superstar and saving the species.
Singlehandedly? Not quite. There is another male tortoise called E5 who has fathered even more progeny, but because he doesn’t have a proper name and tends to be more discreet in his lovemaking he has been largely ignored. Branding is everything in the celebrity tortoise world.
What now for Diego? Much-deserved retirement. The giant tortoise population on Española has been deemed self-sustaining, the breeding programme on Santa Cruz is being closed down and Diego can go home to his native island after almost 80 years away.
Oh, how sweet. What about E5? Who knows. He’s not the story!
OK, well, how do giant tortoises mate? Noisily.
What’s their favourite chat-up line? “A word in your shell-like.”
How do they arrange dates? By shellphone.
Not to be confused with: Lonesome George, a Pinta Island tortoise who was the last member of his species, Chelonoidis abingdonii. Attempts to mate him with females of a similar species were unsuccessful and he died in 2012 at the age of 102.
Do say: “Enjoy a quiet retirement, Diego.”
Don’t say: “What about a spot on Love Island?”
