How to determine the age of a land tortoise? Two easy ways

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:53

The owners are wondering how old their pet is, in cases where it fell into their hands from random people. To know how to determine the age of tortoises, you need to know the structure of their shell.

Turtles in nature

First, let's get acquainted with the land turtle itself, because before you start this reptile in the house, you need to at least learn a little about it. So, a land tortoise, it is also Central Asian, it is also a steppe. Although it is called the steppe, but the native habitat of this species are the deserts of Central Asia.

Turtles eat plant foods. In winter they hibernate. Sexual maturity occurs at about ten years of age. The female lays several eggs, but not all at once, but at intervals of two days. Newborn turtles are only 30 mm long. Interestingly, as soon as they are born, they immediately burrow into the ground, where they winter, and in the spring they go free.

The structure of a turtle

This reptile has four limbs, and the front ones are four-toed. The carapace is round and low, its color can bevarious shades of yellow-brown or yellow-green, with black or brown spots on each shield. This coloring allows you to perfectly camouflage among the sands and dry grass.

How to determine the age of a tortoise? One way is by the shields of her shell. It consists of a carapace (dorsal) and a plastron (abdominal). In newborn turtles, the shell is soft, it gradually hardens. The plastron is divided into 16 shields. Carapace has 13 central shields, 25 more are located on the sides, smaller in size.

The scutes of the carapace have grooves that resemble circles on a cut of a tree. Now you guessed how to determine the age of a land tortoise? Yes, just like the age of a tree - by rings.

Determining the age of a turtle in two ways

So, the first way to determine the age of a land tortoise is by concentric rings. They appear on the scutes of small turtles already in the first year of life. Moreover, in the first two years their growth is very intensive, one furrow on the shell appears after 3-6 months, and then - 1 or 2 rings per year. It is difficult to know how old the old representatives of this species are, since the shell becomes smooth and the grooves are almost invisible.

To make the answer more accurate, you can count the rings on 3-5 shields, and then calculate the average value. This method does not give a 100% result, because domestic turtles lead a completely different lifestyle than in their natural environment.

The conditions have a great influence on their developmentmaintenance, as well as whether they sleep in winter. Domestic turtles reach sexual maturity much earlier than their relatives living in the wild, and live longer (up to 20, and under favorable conditions up to 30 years).

There is another way to determine the age of a tortoise. To do this, measure the length of the shell with a ruler. It is known that up to ten years, these reptiles grow quite quickly. Upon reaching a length of approximately 18-20 cm, their growth slows down and almost does not change. Although in nature there are specimens about 30 cm in size.

Newborn turtles are 3 cm long, their growth almost doubles (5 cm) in a year, and each subsequent year of life adds about 2 cm. Females are much larger in size than males. Let's make some simple calculations and find out how to determine the age of a land turtle: if, for example, the length of the animal's shell is 14 cm, then it is about 6 years old.

Of course, these methods of determining the age are very approximate, but using both, you can at least roughly find out how long your pet lives in the world.