Critically Endangered
Geometric tortoise
Psammobates geometricus
Geometric tortoise is a tortoise in the family Testudinidae — Psammobates geometricus, recorded as Critically Endangered and tied to South Africa.
Appearance
It has a very strong, black and yellow patterned carapace, used for defence against predators. The patterns are arranged in ray-like markings and help the tortoise blend in with its environment. From a birds eye view the shell has geometrical symbols on it thus giving it its name.
Range and habitat
It used to occur as far north as Piketberg, as far south as Gordons Bay and eastwards into the Breede River valley. The habitat type of geometric tortoise is known as the renosterveld, that is located at the extreme southwestern part of the Western Cape Province of South Africa. The geometric tortoise is able to have specific dietary preferences, adaptation to wet habitats and topographical factors to survival in the habitat.
Its environment is now reduced to thirty-one habitat fragments that include seven reserves. Cape Nature Conservation is one of the four provincial nature preserves that the tortoises reside in.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
The geometric tortoise's diet consists mainly of the leaves, geophytes, flowers, and shoots of a wide range of indigenous fynbos and renosterveld plant and grass species. The specific diet, together with climate, humidity and soil differences, are the principal reasons why the species does not survive for long outside of its habitat.
In crisis
This species is one of the rarest land tortoises in the world, classified as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List. Its habitat is under constant threat of destruction and fragmentation as a result of, frequent fires, increase in the predation rates, and an increase in vegetation not native to the region. The tortoise is marked as a high priority for the nature preserve, so they continually monitor the population of the animals to track their conservation efforts.
Cape Nature Conservation believes that tracking the population of a certain special is an early alert system to help determine that animals are more critical than others and helps determine what the animals thrive from and what hurts them. Observation of the population is the foundation to any conservation efforts made to help this species.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Geometric tortoise 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 Geometric tortoise, Wikidata item Q2392362. 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.
