Central American river turtle

Appearance

It has a low, flattened, smooth carapace with a median keel present in juveniles, it is usually a uniform brown, almost black, grey or olive in colour. The plastron is usually white to yellow, though may acquire substrate staining in some areas. Its skin is predominantly the same colour as the shell, with reddish or peach-coloured markings around the neck and underside.

Central American river turtle It is a relatively large-bodied species, with historical records of 60 cm (24 in) straight carapace length and weights of 22 kg (49 lb). Even so, more recent records have found few individuals over 14 kg (31 lb) in Mexico or 11 kg (24 lb) in Guatemala.

Range and habitat

Central American river turtle lives in Atlantic-draining larger rivers and lakes in Central America, from southern Mexico through Belize to the Guatemalan-Honduran border. In Mexico it occurs in the states of Veracruz, Tabasco, Campeche, the north of Oaxaca, the north of Chiapas and the south of Quintana Roo, primarily in the hydrological basins of the Papaloapan, Coatzacoalcos and Grijalva-Usumacinta River systems. In Guatemala the species occurs from southern and central Petén Department, south to Lago de Izabal and the rivers that drain into it.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet and breeding

Central American river turtle is a nocturnal, completely aquatic turtle that does not bask or leave the water, except to lay eggs. The crocodiles Crocodylus moreletii and C. Acutus usually feed on juveniles and hatchlings, or intermediate-sized turtles.

There appears to be a primary breeding season timed with the later part of the rainy season (September to December) and a secondary one at the beginning of the dry season (January to February). In 1996 Polisar published that it was quite possible that the turtles nest underwater like the Australian Chelodina rugosa, a claim repeated as a certainty in later works, but in 2011 Vogt et al.

In crisis

Bizarrely for reptiles, the eggs can remain viable even after being underwater for weeks -in the recent past, some scientists mistakenly claimed it nests underwater, likely due to visiting Central America during a frequent flood, when nests are often submerged. The Maya probably exported these turtles to areas where they do not occur, based on their shell remains in kitchen middens. There is genetic evidence that the Mayans and other ancient peoples may have hunted the turtle to local extinction in areas it now occurs in, and that some modern turtle populations stem from turtles introduced into waterways from elsewhere.

This has prompted Western conservationists to declare this use unsustainable, and that the turtle is now 'critically endangered', especially singling out the people of Tabasco as the culprits. In Belize, the only country where it is still legal to hunt these animals, it is still common in some areas, but populations are devastated in areas where people live.

CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.

Central American river turtle is Critically 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 Hickatee, Wikidata item Q301044. 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.