A veterinary surgeon removed the freakishly large bladder stones from a desert tortoise at the San Francisco Zoo and patched the hole in the tortoise's undershell with fiberglass, in a procedure the surgeon likened to "fixing a ding in a surfboard."
One stone was the size of a baseball and the other three were as big as golf balls. They added up to 553 grams, a little over a pound — which is a lot for an animal like Cactus, who normally weighs 8 pounds and enjoys eating his namesake…
During last week's 90-minute operation on Cactus, Dunker cut a 3-by-4- inch rectangle in the tortoise's plastron, or underbelly shell, partially scoring the flap closest to the head.
"I hinged it and left it up like the hood of a car," Dunker said. "Then we had our starting point."
After removing the stones, he applied a fiberglass patch and sealed it with five-minute epoxy. It will take two years to heal.
"It was like fixing a ding in a surfboard," said Dunker, who performed a similar operation in 1992 on a tortoise from San Francisco's Randall Museum.
(via Fark)
