Saturn (alligator)

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Saturn in the Moscow Zoo, 2009

Saturn (* 1936 in Mississippi ; † May 22, 2020 in Moscow ) was a Mississippi alligator , which is one of the oldest known alligators.

Saturn came to the Berlin zoo early after it had been donated to the zoo, but it broke out of the badly damaged aquarium during a bombing of Berlin-Charlottenburg on the night of November 23rd to 24th, 1943 . Only 96 of the approximately 16,000 animals survived in the Berlin zoo. Saturn, which was perhaps 1.2 m long at this time, is said to have been discovered by accident by British soldiers in 1946 and brought to Leipzig in the Soviet occupation zone . Since July 1946 he has lived in the Moscow Zoo , where initially there were only two crocodiles. Almost immediately after his arrival, the rumor arose that he was a favorite animal of Adolf Hitler , but there is no evidence of this. In any case, this invention was one reason his death moved the world press.

In the wild, the press rumored, animals rarely grew older than 50 years. However, this refutes a study by the Tom Yawkey Wildlife Center in South Carolina , in which the ages of two females were found to be 68 and 66 years old. It was found that zoo animals could even live for over 80 years, for example Jean-qui-rit , who lived in the Paris Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes from 1852 to 1937 . His age is considered relatively well secured. The alligator Muja , who lives in the Belgrade Zoo , has been there since 1937, making it at least 83 years old. This makes it the oldest alligator. Muja survived both the German bombing of the Belgrade Zoo in 1941 and the Allied bombing in 1944.

How Saturn came to Moscow can no longer be traced, since the zoo's files were burned in the 1950s. However, a photo from 1936 or 1946 documents the brutal transport that animals of this era usually had to endure: It shows Saturn tied with thick ropes and a wooden beam between the pines in order to transport him across the Atlantic or to Moscow. In 1970, there was a near-serious accident when a young guard tried to hand-feed the alligator; a falling concrete slab almost killed Saturn - he is said to have suspected this and crawled into a niche. When a new aquarium was built in 1990, the alligator refused to eat for four months after moving. For a while he linked up with an alligator named Shipka, and in 2003 the fashion company Lacoste , which has a crocodile in its logo, took over the sponsorship. In 2005 Saturn measured 3.5 m and lived in a 5 by 5 m aquarium with a female 30 years younger. Since the death of the oldest alligator Čabulītis in 2007, Muja has been considered the oldest crocodile in the world.

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  1. ↑ Berlin WW2 bombing survivor Saturn the alligator dies in Moscow Zoo , BBC, May 23, 2020.
  2. ↑ Kent A. Vliet: Alligators. The Illustrated Guide to Their Biology, Behavior, and Conservation , Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020, p. 213.
  3. ↑ Рассказ Бориса Акунина. Сатурн почти не виден (analogously: story of Boris Akunin. Saturn is barely visible ), Moscow Zoo, archive.org, February 19, 2015 (there is a photo of the constricted alligator).
  4. ↑ Legends of the Moscow Zoo: Reptilian rumors and killer crocs , Russia Beyond, February 24, 2017 (with partly incorrect information, such as 1945 for the bombing of the aquarium).