Endangered
Amboina box turtle
Cuora amboinensis
Amboina box turtle is a turtle in the family Geoemydidae — Cuora amboinensis, recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
All have a blackish olive head with three yellow stripes on the side. There is no specific pattern to what the underbellies may look like, for either sex. The only true way of telling age is to guess by the texture of the shell, as growth rings form irregularly.
Range and habitat
The Amboina box turtle is widely distributed across Southeast Asia. Its range extends on the Asian mainland from northeast India, through Bangladesh, Burma and Thailand, across Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Malaysia. It is also found on the archipelagos of Indonesia and the Philippines.
It is native to the Asian mainland from northeast India, through Bangladesh, Burma and Thailand, across Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Malaysia. The type locality is "Amboine" (or "Amboina") Island, today Ambon Island in Indonesia.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The Amboina is omnivorous but tends toward a more vegetarian diet. Mating takes place between November and April after a brief courtship ritual.
The variability in clutch size, egg size and egg-laying season relate to geographic variability and climate.
In crisis
Once common across much of its range, the Amboina box turtle has undergone a rapid population decline in many areas. In 2020 it was classified as Endangered by the IUCN. The primary threat is capture for local consumption, export to China for food and traditional medicine, and export for the pet trade in the United States and Europe.
Although it is adaptable to human-modified landscapes, habitat destruction is still considered a threat in some areas.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Amboina box turtle is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Amboina box turtle, Wikidata item Q458153. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
