Extinction Threatens More than Half of the World’s Turtles and Tortoises

At the end of June, 52 of the world’s leading experts came together to assess the status of the world’s turtles and tortoises. What they concluded is unnerving.

Of the 360 turtle and tortoise species currently recognized, more than half of them (that is, 187 species) meet the criteria for “threatened with extinction” on International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. And just over a third of the species are in such a dismal state that they qualify for the Red List’s two most dire categories: endangered and critically endangered.

“Turtles and tortoises are one of the most threatened groups of animals that we know of,” says Craig Stanford, chair of Tortoise and Freshwater Turtle Specialist Group at the IUCN and lead author of the study. There’s simply no other group of animals of several hundred species where more than half of them are staring down extinction. “That’s just extraordinary,” Stanford says.

Myriad reasons exist for the decline of these armored animals. For one, it seems turtles and tortoises may be more susceptible to human disturbance because they are slow, plodding creatures—a trait that makes them particularly vulnerable to hunting and vehicle collisions as well as easy prey for invasive species, such as European red foxes, which are annihilating many of Australia’s turtle species. Their reproductive cycle also doesn’t do them any favors in this regard. While most turtle species produce large clutches of eggs, only a lucky few of their offspring survive to adulthood. It also takes them a long time to reach an age where they will successfully mate. So their population growth also tends to be slow going.

All that said, living long and slow has worked just fine for turtles and tortoises for hundreds of millions of years. They were here before the dinosaurs and have been scooching along ever since. The question now, though, is how long the order Testudines will be able to hack it on this rapidly changing planet.

To get a better sense of what threats turtle-kind is facing, let’s take a short trip around the globe.

Asia

With around 89 species, Asia is home to a staggering number of turtle and tortoise species. Just in the region where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers meet in India and Bangladesh, there are 41 species and another nine live nearby. This area holds the highest concentration of turtle biodiversity in the world. Unfortunately, Asia also boasts higher-than-average levels of turtle species threatened with extinction.

The exploitation of turtles and tortoises for food and use in traditional medicine are the biggest reasons behind these declines. “Right now, China is the largest consumer of turtles,” says Stanford. The critically endangered Chinese three-striped box turtle (Cuora trifasciata) has been particularly hard hit. Scientists don’t even have enough information on how many of the animals might be left to hazard a population estimate.

Recent decades have seen another huge problem pop up for Asia’s ancient reptiles—the rise of the exotic pet trade. For example, each year, poachers nab more than 55,000 Indian star tortoises from the scrublands of India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka so that they can be smuggled into China and Thailand as potential pets. The tortoises are popular because of their starburst-decorated shells—but 55,000! That’s more star tortoises than there are visible stars in the night sky.