Endangered
Indian softshell turtle
Nilssonia gangetica
Indian softshell turtle is a turtle in the family Trionychidae — Nilssonia gangetica, recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
Dorsal skin of young with longitudinal ridges of small tubercles. Head moderate. Snout (on the skull) about as long as the diameter of the orbit; interorbital region, in the adult, considerably narrower than the nasal fossa; postorbital arch one third to one half the greatest diameter of the orbit; mandible with the inner edge strongly raised, forming a sharp ridge, that sends off a short perpendicular process at the symphysis; the diameter of the mandible at the symphysis does not exceed the diameter of the orbit. Olive above. Back of young vermiculated with fine black lines, but without ocelli; head with a black longitudinal streak from between the eyes to the nape, intersected by two or three inverted-V shaped black streaks; lower parts yellowish.
Length of dorsal disk 2 feet. This vulnerable turtle reaches a carapace length of up to 94 cm (37 in).
Range and habitat
This species is often found to occur in the Indus, Ganges/Padma, Meghna, Brahmaputra, Jamuna, Narmada and Mahanadi basins and most of their tributaries and intervening drainages and in the countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India (Assam, Bihar, Gujarat, Jammu & Kashmir, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal), Southern Nepal and Pakistan. The Indian softshell turtle, or Ganges softshell turtle, is a softshell turtle found in South Asia in rivers such as the Ganges, Indus and Mahanadi.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
It feeds mostly on fish, amphibians, carrion and other animal matter, but also takes aquatic plants.
In crisis
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Indian softshell 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 Indian softshell turtle, Wikidata item Q262416. 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.
