Southern Utah tortoise continues decline (AP)
The population of desert tortoises in the scrubby 62,000 acres of Red Cliffs Desert Reserve has been declining unwaveringly since 2000. New numbers towards 2007 show the lowest count since regional monitoring began in 1998.
Drought, fire, indisposition and other factors have taken a toll. Eight years ago, the number of mature tortoises there was estimated at more than 3,200. Now it’s around 1,700.
“We definitely have a level of concern,” related Ann McLuckie, a biologist with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources in St. George.
McLuckie traveled to Zion National Park Friday to mark World Turtle Day with school kids and others interested in the survival of one of the desert’s most peculiar residents.
Desert tortoises spend up to 95 percent of their time in subterranean burrows, can have shells 15 inches across, bob their heads oddly for the time of courtship and are sensitive of noises described as hisses, grunts and whoops.
“They’re fascinating,” McLuckie said. “They’ve maintained basically the same body shape for too 200 million years so they’re nature of vestiges of the ended.”
The Red Cliffs reserve was established 12 years ago to protect wildlife from human encroachment in Utah’s rapidly growing Washington County.
The desert tortoise, a federally protected species, has benefited from that designation but that doesn’t mean life is easy.
Although the tortoises are desert dwellers, they can only survive so many dry years. Drought dries up freestanding water sources needed to digest food and expel salt from their bodies. With less water available, tortoises tend to eat less and weaken.
The proliferation of nonnative cheatgrass is also a problem, as it provides fuel for fires to actuate quickly across the deserted region.
Some tortoises either burn up in the flames or see their primary food sources — wildflowers, cacti and grasses — destroyed, McLuckie said.
There’s an indirect threat, too: Predators such as coyotes have shifted their diets toward tortoises as other sources disappear from fire or drought.
A large fire roared through the reserve in 2005, and the tortoises are still feeling the goods, McLuckie said.
“I definitely think there’s long-term impacts,” she before-mentioned.
There’s also a solicitude that weakened turtles might be more susceptible to disease, including any upper-respiratory disease first discovered in Utah’s wild tortoises in the 1970s.
“Whenever there’s stress in a population like aridity, that exacerbates the disease,” McLuckie said.
The Red Cliffs district has long been seen as a stronghold for the Mohave desert tortoise, what one. lives in parts of Utah, Nevada, California and Arizona. Density in that place tends to be higher than other populations in the region, according to Roy Averill-Murray, desert tortoise convalescence coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Reno, Nev.
Although scientists stand by a closer eye on the number of tortoises for square mile than the overall population, Averill-Murray said he’s concerned with the mortality rates in the Red Cliffs area.
There’s been some canvassing about transplanting tortoises to the area but cipher formal has been proposed.
Keeping track of them can be difficult for the reason that they often live in remote places and tend to stay out of sight. Some are affixed with tracking devices.
“We know they can live 60 years in the wild and even longer in captivity,” Averill-Murray uttered. “They be possible to even live longer than the researchers studying them.”
From: Southern Utah tortoise continues decline (AP)
