Critically Endangered
Desert tortoise
Gopherus agassizii
Desert tortoise is a tortoise in the family Testudinidae — Gopherus agassizii, recorded as Critically Endangered and tied to United States.
Appearance
A male tortoise has a longer gular horn than a female, his plastron (lower shell) is concave compared to a female tortoise. Their shells are high-domed, and greenish-tan to dark brown in color. The high domes of their shells allow for space for their lungs, that helps them maintain thermoregulation, also known as maintaining internal temperature.
Desert tortoises can grow to 10–15 cm (4–6 in) in height.
Range and habitat
An isolated population of Agassiz's desert tortoise occurs in the Black Mountains of northwestern Arizona. Tortoises show very strong site fidelity, and have well-established home ranges where they know where their food, water, and mineral resources are. Desert tortoises inhabit elevations from below mean sea level in Death Valley to 1,600 m (5,300 ft) in Arizona, though they are most common from around 300 to 1,050 m (1,000 to 3,500 ft).
The Desert Tortoise Preserve Committee protects roughly 2,000 hectares (5,000 acres) of desert tortoise habitat from human activity.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The desert tortoise is an herbivore. Grasses form the bulk of its diet, but it also eats herbs, annual wildflowers, and new growth of cacti, as well as their fruit and flowers.
Tortoises mate in the spring and autumn. He then climbs upon the female and insert his penis (a white organ, usually only seen upon careful inspection during mating, as it is hidden inside the male and can only be coaxed out with sexual implication) into the cloaca of a female, that is located around the tail.
In crisis
Ravens, Gila monsters, kit foxes, badgers, roadrunners, coyotes, and fire ants are all natural predators of the desert tortoise. The most significant threats to tortoises include urbanization, disease, habitat destruction and fragmentation, illegal collection and vandalism by humans, and habitat conversion from invasive plant species (Brassica tournefortii, Bromus rubens and Erodium spp.). Desert tortoise populations in some areas have declined by as much as 90% since the 1980s, and the Mojave population is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act of 1973 in 1990, after being listed as endangered, or threatened in the case of the Beaver Dam Slope, Utah population, under an emergency rule in 1989.
All desert tortoises are protected under law of the United States based on similarity of appearance to tortoises of the protected Mojave population. Another potential threat to the desert tortoise's habitat is a series of proposed wind and solar farms.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Desert 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 Desert tortoise, Wikidata item Q914356. 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.
