Tortioses Of The World Essay Research Paper

Tortioses Of The World Essay, Research Paper

I choose this topic of tortoises because I have four of my own. I would like to learn more about them and maybe different types of things I could do to make their lives better. I have Desert Tortoises but I would also like to learn about many other types of tortoises and their shapes and sizes.

I have four big tortoises and four baby tortoises. Sammy,Scooter,Grumpy,Red, and the four babies which are about five months old. A man at the Water District gave us are first tortoise Sammy. Soon coming that year we found Grumpy on the side of the highway with a big crack in his back. We took him home fed him then took him to the veterinarian early the next morning. They patched him up and we got to take him home but we had to give him a shot every meal for about a month. That’s where he got his name he didn t like the shots much and would hide away in a corner after them. Scooter and Red are Desert Tortoises but a different kind. They are more oval shaped which gives us more of a variety. They seem to like fruit more. Sammy and Grumpy mated and Sammy laid her eggs in a deep burrow between two rocks. The eggs hatched somewhere in between seventy to one hundred and twenty days. We found the first baby tortoise in the front yard and that’s when we knew we had to have a complete search of our backyard and the front for the first day before we blocked up even the tiniest of holes in the gates with wood. We searched the yards for about two weeks just in case of any of them were hiding. We found five total but one was already dead in the road. It was ran over by a car days earlier before we found the first tortoise. The other four are healthy and growing bigger everyday. We feed them in the afternoon when I get home from school or when my mom gets off work. They not only walk slow but they eat slow too. I think it s a great experience to own Desert Tortoises and if you can I would get one for yourself.

Tortoises are in the family of the Testudinidae. Tortoises live on land and are mostly vegetarian reptiles. A few forms of Omnivorous. In some places tortoises represent slowness, determination, and long life. There are about forty-one living species of tortoises. The majority of them live in Africa and Madagascar .

Some ways you can tell the reptile is a tortoise are by their high dome like shells, heavy elephant-like hind legs in which their toes are very short and do not have any webbing, and hard scaled front legs. The color of a tortoise is mostly shades of brown, olive, yellow and black, brown and black, mostly yellow, scutes plain or commonly patterned with bright rays or concentric rings. They have leathery to brittle shells depending on the tortoise.

Some of the types of tortoises could be the species of the Giant Tortoises. They are now rare or extinct because man destroyed their habitats or because pigs, goats, or rats ate their babies. Some of the Giant Tortoise weights have been recorded as about one hundred eighty kilograms.

Another species is the Gopher Tortoise. They have brown shells and are accomplished diggers . This is because their front legs are much flatter and serve as digging scoops. These tortoises live in sandy and wooded regions of the Southern United States.

The Desert Tortoise lives in desert and open wooded areas around the South Western United States and Mexico.

Berlandiers Tortoise is near deserts and wooded areas of Texas and parts of Northern Mexico.

There is also a recent discovery of a tortoise called the Bophenus Flauomorginatum. It has only been located in a small area in North Central Mexico.

A tortoises shell has fifty-nine to sixty-one bones in it. It has two parts a carapace and a plastron witch covers it s belly. So successful was the shell that it became a cornerstone of tortoise architecture. Because of the shell they can not run, jump, or fly. Tortoise shells typically are high-vaulted shells as protection from their predators crushing jaws.

One type of tortoise that does not have a high shell but a extremely flattened one is the African Pancake. This allows that tortoise to squeeze into small cracks in between rocks where they have their habitat. When a tortoise has become wedged in between something they become extremely hard to pull out.

Another part of a shell could be a hinged plastron. Madagascar and Egyptian Tortoises have developed one or two plastral hinges and the African Hinge-backed Tortoises have a hinge on the carapace rather than on their plastron. Hinges give tortoises the ability to tightly close their shell with all their parts with in. This provides protection from loss of moisture.

Most tortoises attain a maximum size of at least five inches in shell length. The Speckled Cape Tortoise have a maximum shell length of less than four point seven inches. They are among the worlds smallest tortoises. One of the worlds largest tortoises is the Aldabra Giant Tortoise at fifty-five inches and five hundred and fifty-nine pounds.

Certainly most tortoises, with their ability to move held back by their big shells are slow. The Desert Tortoise moves at speeds of zero point thirteen to zero point three miles per hour. The Galapagos Giant Tortoise was clocked at four miles per day.

When tortoises mate it typically consists of some head bobbing, the male butting and biti