Endangered
Pig-nosed turtle
Carettochelys insculpta
Pig-nosed turtle is a turtle in the family Carettochelyidae — Carettochelys insculpta, recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
The nose looks like that of a pig, having the nostrils at the end of a fleshy snout, hence the common name. The carapace is typically grey or olive, with a leathery texture, while the plastron is cream-coloured. Unlike the soft-shelled turtles of the family Trionychidae, the pig-nosed turtle retains a domed bony carapace beneath its leathery skin, rather than a flat plate.
The pig-nosed turtles can grow to about 70 to 75 cm (28 to 30 in) straight carapace length, with a weight of over 20 kg (44 lb).
Range and habitat
C. Insculpta is native to freshwater streams, lagoons and rivers of the Northern Territory of Australia, as well as to the island of New Guinea, where it is believed to occur in all the larger, and some smaller, southward-flowing rivers. The pig-nosed turtle, also known as the Fly River turtle, pitted-shelled turtle, and the Warrajan, is a turtle that is native to northern Australia and southern New Guinea.
In Papua New Guinea, herpetologist Yolarnie Amepou runs the Piku Biodiversity Network Inc. That empowers local communities to monitor turtle populations and set their own targets for harvest, in the hope of building sustainable practices to preserve the population.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Habits
The pig-nosed turtle is not completely aquatic.
In crisis
C. Insculpta experienced a population decline of more than 50% in the thirty years between 1981 and 2011. An analysis of 26 reported seizures over the period 2013 to 2020, of that 20 took place in Indonesia and the remaining five in other parts of Asia with the turtles being trafficked from Indonesia, involved a total of 52,374 pig-nosed turtles.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Pig-nosed 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 Pig-nosed turtle, Wikidata item Q457742. 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.
