disorientation

My female owner wonders if turtles will die of disorientation (i.e. being upside down for a prolonged period of time). You see, Dodo recently developed this habit of turning upside down once a day. He would be trying to scale something, say the ledge or wall or the tank and would somehow, flip over. He would then make those pitiful scrapping sounds while trying to flip himself back up and would inevitably attract my female owner's attention.

Dodo has therefore earned the nickname, silly turtle. Therapist Fren, the eternal optimist, suggests that maybe he enjoys seeing the world upside down. To which my female owner retorts, if that is the case, why is he giving conflicting body language through his desperate attempts to turn the right way up? It's confusing her, she says.

Anyway, my female owner recently left for a four-day holiday with her parents to Cambodia. That means that no one is at home during this period to flip Dodo back up, if he does his turtle dance. And my anxiety-prone female owner started to wonder what might happen if he turns turtle and remains on his back until the family returns home. Would he die of disorientation? According to Therapist Fren (she actually did a professional google search on this topic on her own accord - so nice), there is no such history of turtles dying by disorientation. Phew!

Ah, and my female owner, the eternal pessimist, wonders if Dodo might turn out to be the first ever recorded case study of death by disorientation.