7/25/2023 0 Comments Pinta island tortoise adaptationsIsland giants: Naturalist Charles Darwin made his historic voyage on the HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836. To us, this looks like they’re just putting on a show but it’s a serious matter to the tortoises, especially in the wilderness, where fights occur over mates or a specific food item or clump of food. Whoever reaches the highest wins, even if he is much smaller overall than the other male! The loser pulls his head in with a noisy hiss, and the battle is over. If a fight breaks out among males, the tortoises face each other with ferocious glares, open their mouth, and stretch their head as high as they can. The hissing sound is just the tortoise letting air out of its lungs. When threatened, the tortoise pulls itself into its shell with a hiss. The lungs are located on the top of the tortoise’s body, under the top dome of the shell. The shell encompasses the animal’s ribs, so a tortoise cannot "walk out" of its shell, like you may see in cartoons. This makes it possible for the tortoise to carry the weight of the shell without much difficulty. Instead, they are made up of honeycomb structures that enclose small air chambers. The largest, with big, round shells, are called “domes.” The smaller kinds of tortoises have shells that curl up in front like a saddle and are called “saddlebacks.”Īlthough they are massive animals, their shells are not solid. There are two types of Galápagos tortoises. They have thick, sturdy legs to hold up all that weight, but they still spend a lot of time lying down to conserve energy. Males can weigh more than 500 pounds (227 kilograms), and females average about 250 pounds (113 kilograms). Adapting and surviving: Galápagos tortoises are the giants of the tortoise world.
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