George is not what you would call a stud. When I visited him in 1985, he was thought to be a relatively young adult, maybe 50 years old, but he was already a confirmed bachelor. He hadn’t shown any interest in two females of a similar species placed in his pen. One had flipped over and drowned in the wading pool. The keepers weren’t positive that George had driven this tortoise to her death, but he definitely hadn’t been doing any Barry White serenades.

A few years later, in 1993, there was briefly a companion known as “Lonesome George’s girlfriend,” but she was not a tortoise. She was a 26-year-old graduate student in zoology from Switzerland named Sveva Grigioni.

By coating her hands in the genital secretions of female tortoises and gently stroking him, she managed to demonstrate a couple of times (in the course of several months’ work) that George was capable of an erection. But whereas her touch could induce other male tortoises to reach orgasm within a few minutes, with George she never managed to collect any sperm.

Her ministrations — or maybe it was the pheromones in the secretions — did seem to pique George’s interest in the female tortoises, as Ms. Grigioni reported to Henry Nicholls, the author of the definitive new biography, “Lonesome George: The Life and Loves of a Conservation Icon.” But George’s temporary interest did not translate into performance.

Image Credit... Laurie Rosenwald

“He started to try copulation,” Ms. Grigioni said, “but it was like he didn’t really know how to.”

To be fair to George, he’s never been observed with a female of his race, Geochelone nigra abingdoni. (It has been traditionally classified a subspecies of giant tortoise, but many biologists now consider it a separate species.) After the news last week, I sought a prognosis from Ms. Grigioni on the prospects for abingdoni love.

“No one knows how George would react,” she replied tactfully. “The only way to know is to try. It is possible that he would recognize abingdoni pheromones, but there is no evidence that different species have different pheromones.” That didn’t sound too promising, but Ms. Grigioni tried to be optimistic. If a Pinta female arrives in George’s pen, she said, “nature will do the best she can.”