What’s the Fastest Turtle?

Turtles: they’re not renowned for their speed. Sure, the turtle** wins in The Tortoise and the Hare, but just to serve as a humiliating example of arrogance. No one celebrates for the tortoise in that story, you know? It’s ok, though. Turtles don’t mind! There’s no need to be fast when you carry your own armor for defense and your food is stationary.

But surely there is at least one turtle that’s massively mobile. A turtle with wheels. A turbo turtle. Which turtle is it? Can any turtle outrun a human? What is the fastest a turtle can go?

We begin with the official recordkeepers. The Guinness Book of World Records maintains the record for fastest tortoise: the tortoise ran at an average speed of 0.63 miles per hour.[1] Tortoises are notoriously slow, however, even for turtles. We can do better.

Some turtles can “sprint” much faster than any tortoise. Compare the Guinness World Record tortoise video[2] against any number of Youtube “fastest turtle” videos to see soft-shelled turtles rushing to safety (gee, what incentive would a soft-shelled turtle have to be able to move quickly?). From one of these “fastest turtle” videos, I estimated the speed of a sprinting turtle based on the distance it ran (about 15 feet), divided by the time it took to move that distance (about 3 seconds). From that quick calculation, soft-shelled turtles can move at a speed of 3 miles per hour. For comparison, that’s a comfortable walking pace for an adult human.

That’s not the fastest turtle, though: turtles swim much faster than they can walk, and the blog post’s question didn’t specify how the fastest turtle was getting around. The leatherback sea turtle is reported as being able to swim up to 22 miles per hour, though I could not find an original source for that claim.[3]

We’re not done yet: turtles have moved at least 1,000 times faster than even the fastest sea turtle.

Animals have been launched into space many times to test the effects of space on living things.[4] Turtles have had their share of space flights: turtles have been sent into low-earth orbit by Soviet (Soyuz 20) and Iranian (Kavoshgar-3) space missions. All turtles survived both missions. To maintain low-earth orbit, the turtles traveled at 17,000 miles per hour.[5]

But the fastest turtles ever, and the ones who have been farthest from earth, are two Russian tortoises that were launched aboard the Zond 5 spacecraft in 1968. This spacecraft traveled to the moon (it didn’t land, of course: humans are the only animal that has stepped onto the moon) and returned safely to earth. Details about the speed of this flight are difficult to find.

However, NASA used a similar flight plan during the Apollo missions, and those flights reached speeds of 23,000 miles per hour.[7] It is fair to conclude that the Zond 5 spacecraft and those two Russian tortoises reached a similar speed! Leatherback turtles travel over 10,000 miles during their migrations.[8] If a leatherback turtle could swim its maximum speed without stopping, it would complete that trip in 19 days. A rocket-propelled turtle covers that distance in 25 minutes.

And that, without a doubt, is the fastest a turtle has ever traveled.