Mario Herz Fig. 5. View
Mario Herz Fig. 5. View of a pen housing a breeding group of Aldabrachelys gigantea hololissa (Seychelles Giant Tortoise). Fig. 6. A nursery pen for older juveniles. 6 RADIATA 22 (4), 2013
Aldabra Giant Tortoise, Aldabrachelys gigantea gigantea The two islands sport ranger stations, and the rangers enforce order on the islands, inform visiting tourists, and take them on guided tours. The interested holidaymaker can learn from them about the native flora and fauna of the respective island. If juvenile tortoises are discovered during these tours, they will be collected, raised at the stations for their first three years of life, and then released back into the wild. The free-ranging tortoises are not provided with food and have to make do with the meagre grass cover and leaves falling from trees. Freshwater is not accessible to the tortoises on either island. If they want to drink, they will have to wait for the next of the sparse rains. It is thus that the giant tortoises will gain significantly in weight from taking in water during the rainy season. As a consequence of the time schedule of the ferries, I usually arrived on these islands in the late morning hours. The tortoises would then typically be seen in their shelters, with none of them basking. Some specimens would wallow in a mud hole, others were foraging for food, and yet others were spotted resting in the thick underbrush. I furthermore had opportunity to see the adult tortoises and captive-bred young managed by the Nature Protection Trust of Seychelles (NPTS) on the island of Silhouette. At the time of my visit, the NPTS used to run a tortoise and freshwater turtle breeding station on this island, which has meanwhile been closed down (Gerlach 2011). Before the nature protection efforts were discontinued, some 160 giant tortoises had been raised here (Gerlach 2011). Further opportunities for making observations on giant tortoises presented themselves in the shape of so-called “tortoise pens” in which these animals were being kept like pets, and partly in large “flocks”, in various places on the Seychelles Islands. With the time of my visit in November coinciding with the mating seasons of the giant tortoises, I also witnessed copulation events, usually in the early afternoon hours. The sounds of mating could be heard over large distances. I noted that large male specimens with carapace Fig. 7. A male Seychelles Giant Tortoise resting in the shade of trees. Fig. 8. A male in the wild on Cousin Island. Fig. 9. View of the installation on Changuu Island, Zanzibar (Tanzania) with a part of the breeding colony of Seychelles Giant Tortoises. RADIATA 22 (4), 2013 7
