Unwanted pet tortoises create problems for researchers

The folks in charge of saving one of the Mojave Desert's most iconic and imperiled reptiles have an unusual request: No more tortoises, please.

Officials at the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center at the valley's southwestern edge say they are being overrun by one-time pets and strays.

More than 1,000 unwanted tortoises wind up there each year, turning the federal facility into an animal shelter instead of the research and recovery center it is trying to become.

"It's been a regular onslaught," said Roy Averill-Murray, desert tortoise recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Nevada and California. "They are pretty much swamping us out there."

Dr. Allyson Walsh is the associate director of applied animal ecology for the San Diego Zoo, which began managing the conservation center in 2009 under a partnership with the fish and wildlife service and other agencies.

By some admittedly rough estimates, there might be as many as 150,000 captive tortoises in the Las Vegas Valley alone, Walsh said.

"It's a very unique situation. I can't think of another animal that's listed under the Endangered Species Act that is also a pet."

THE TORTOISE HOTLINE

Research associate Lori Scott mans the tortoise hotline at the center. She said the phone scarcely rings during the winter, when tortoises disappear underground to sleep away the season. But from April to October, when tortoises are active, Scott fields up to 15 calls in an average day, many of them from people looking to give up a pet or report a stray.

On a few occasions, a tortoise has been turned in by someone who moved into a house and discovered the animal already living in the yard - abandoned there by the previous owner, Scott said.

September is especially busy, because that's when the babies hatch - sometimes 10 of them or more from a single clutch of eggs.

Hatchlings account for about 40 percent of the tortoises turned in annually.

The center currently houses more than 2,400 tortoises. No breeding is being done - at least not intentionally - but the facility had to build special enclosures for the hatchlings that are dropped off there and need extra protection from predators such as ravens, ground squirrels and even ants.

More tortoises means higher food and staffing costs, not to mention the need for additional pens capable of holding animals driven by instinct to wander.

"They're great escape artists," said Angie Covert, the center's senior research coordinator. "You can look at a pen and not see how it got out, but it did."

The bottom line, Walsh said: "The center is not meant to be a humane shelter."

Instead, they would like to be doing more work like the study now under way by Jen Germano, a postdoctoral researcher from the San Diego Zoo. She is using strategically placed coyote urine to test how wild tortoises and pet tortoises respond to predator keys.

If the threat responses are the same - even for captive-born tortoises more familiar with patio furniture than predators - it could save recovery workers the trouble of having to retrain pets for their new lives in the open desert, Germano said.

ESTIMATING NUMBERS IN THE WILD

Researchers are still trying to get a grasp on how many Mojave Desert tortoises remain in the wild, but the general consensus is that their numbers are on the decline, Walsh said.

"The species is still in trouble out there," she said.

The primary threats are habitat destruction and disease. Walsh said most of the tortoises that are turned over to the center are healthy, but releasing one-time pets into the desert can expose the wild population to diseases.

That's why each new arrival to the center undergoes a health examination and blood work, a process that takes both time and money.

It's a simple math problem for the center. A thousand tortoises come in annually, but the facility only has the resources to release about 500 into the wild each year.

The translocation program, as it is known, is still in its infancy, especially when compared to the life span of your average desert tortoise.

So far, though, tortoises born in the backyards of Las Vegas have fared well when set free in the 44-square-mile release area near Jean.

"A pet tortoise knows it's a tortoise when it goes back into the wild," Averill-Murray said. "They set about eating and looking for a burrow."

Several dozen of the animals currently roaming the release area have GPS tracking devices glued to their shells to record their movements.

"We use plumbers epoxy," Covert explained. "That works pretty well."

A LONG-TERM COMMITMENT

In the coming months, the federal agency charged with protecting the threatened Mojave Desert tortoise plans to roll out a public awareness campaign aimed at curbing backyard breeding and keeping the captive population captive.

The campaign will stress the level of responsibility involved in tortoise ownership.

"It's a 50-plus-year commitment to these little guys," said Jeannie Stafford, spokeswoman for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Nevada.

As Averill-Murray put it, tortoises can easily "live longer than the people keeping them or the researchers studying them."

And spaying and neutering an animal encased in a hard shell is not really a viable option. "It's not a common procedure on turtles as you might imagine," Averill-Murray said.

For one thing, gender is not very obvious in tortoises.

"We've had people call and say, 'I've got two males and a clutch of eggs,' " Covert said.

Even the experts struggle with it.

"We've been pretty sure about sex and been wrong," Covert said.

Then there is this: Female tortoises can store sperm for up to 10 years before using it to produce a clutch of eggs. So a pet owner - or the center - could take on a single tortoise, keep it for years and still wind up with an unexpected crop of hatchlings.

Walsh said no one is looking to stomp out tortoise ownership completely. For one thing, the captive population could come in handy someday should something catastrophic happen to tortoises in the wild.

"You can't completely disentangle the pet issue from the recovery program. They are connected, aren't they," she said. "But in the meantime, we can't be inundated with thousands of animals because it is easy to pick up the phone and call the hotline."

Contact reporter Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350.