Instead of eating the eggs, owner parlays annual circle-of-life phenomenon into expansion of his social circle.

Having an indoor pet means sharing your home with an animal companion, but we generally tend to think of turtles as pretty nonintrusive housemates. Nevertheless, when Japanese Twitter user @narupajin felt nature calling, he found that his bathroom was occupied by the Chinese pond turtle he owns.

While it would be an amazing feat for a turtle to learn how to use a human toilet, that’s not actually what @narupajin’s pet was doing. Instead of laying a poop in the toilet, it was laying eggs on the bathroom floor.

▼ “Just got home, but I can’t use the bathroom because my turtle is laying eggs.”

If this story, or perhaps just the Hatsune Miku floor mats, is sounding sort of familiar, that might be because @narupajin achieved Internet fame two years ago when something similar happened. Chinese pond turtles lay eggs annually, and previously @narupajinshared shared snapshots of his reptile friend laying eggs in his shower.

For some reason, though, this year the turtle felt the bathroom was the better place for this endeavor. Since the eggs are unfertilized, though, they won’t hatch into baby turtles. In 2015, @narupajin decided to fry a few and eat them (which proved time-consuming and not particularly tasty), so this year he decided to do something different.

Interpreting the animal’s silent and relaxed demeanor to mean it was giving him permission, @narupajin gathered the nine eggs that the turtle laid this year and told his Twitter followers that he’d be giving them away on a first-come, first-served basis to whoever showed up to meet him at Tokyo’s Akihabara Station. While a full group of nine didn’t gather, a number of people did decide to take him up on his offer, as shown in this group (shoe) photo taken in Akihabara.

@narupajin advised against eating the eggs, for health reasons, though some people seemed determined to try anyway. Others said they planned to use the eggs for non-culinary purposes, such as making accessories.

To celebrate their new, uniquely formed friendship, the members of the group (who had never met each other before this day) then went to sing karaoke. @narupajin’s pet doesn’t seem to have been invited to the festivities, but since turtles can’t sing, it probably didn’t mind sitting the party out.

Source: Togech, Twitter/@narupajin