Critically Endangered
Kleinmann's tortoise
Testudo kleinmanni
Kleinmann's tortoise is a tortoise in the family Testudinidae — Testudo kleinmanni, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
The carapace has a high dome, and ranges in color from ivory to pale gold to dark brown to pink or dull yellow. It is also an effective camouflage in the desert. The plastron is light yellow, often with two dark triangles on each abdominal scute.
Kleinmann's tortoise is the smallest tortoise in the Northern Hemisphere.
Range and habitat
Kleinmann's tortoise lives in deserts and semiarid habitats, usually with compact sand and gravel plains, scattered rocks, shallow, sandy wadis, dry woodlands, shrubby areas, and coastal salt marsh habitats. Kleinmann's tortoise tend to live in habitats that receive less than 50 mm of rain every year. The species is native to Libya and possibly extinct in Egypt.
Mixing individuals from the subpopulations for reintroduction purposes should be avoided, as the ecological parameters of habitat differ.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Habits
During courtship, the male will ram the female, sometimes chasing after her.
In crisis
The species was once more widespread, but its numbers are now dwindling, and complete extinction in the wild is a looming threat unless more actions are taken to protect this species. Once found in Egypt, Libya and Israel, T. Kleinmanni in Egypt has been all but destroyed, and the Egyptian tortoise usually lives in close to complete extinction there. In 2006, only 10 wild individuals were known from the vicinity of Lake Bardawil. The population is still on the decline, and the risk of extinction in the wild is very real if habitat degradation and illegal trade continue at their present rate.
In 2010, the population in Israel put the number under 2,000 individuals. Today, about 7,500 remain, and decline due to habitat destruction and unsustainable exploitation appears to be ongoing.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Kleinmann's 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 Kleinmann's tortoise, Wikidata item Q253781. 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.
