Critically Endangered
Pancake tortoise
Malacochersus tornieri
Pancake tortoise is a tortoise in the family Testudinidae — Malacochersus tornieri, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
The pancake tortoise has an unusually thin, flat, flexible shell, that is up to 17.8 centimetres (7.0 in) long. While the shell bones of most other tortoises are solid, the pancake tortoise has shell bones with many openings, making it lighter and more agile than other tortoises. On the rear of its shell, it has a highly ossified lump that is different from the rest of its bone structure.
Range and habitat
An East African species, M. Tornieri is native to southern Kenya and northern and eastern Tanzania, and an introduced population may also occur in Zimbabwe. It is found on hillsides with rocky outcrops (known as kopjes) in arid thorn scrub and savanna, from 100 to 6,000 feet (30 to 1800 metres) above sea level. The species inhabits the Somalia-Masai floristic region, an arid semi-desert characterized by Acacia-Commiphora bushland and Brachystegia woodland in upland localities.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
Males fight for access to females during the mating season, in January and February, with large males tending to get the most chances to mate. The female digs a nest cavity about 7.5 to 10 cm deep in loose, sandy soil.
Usually only one egg is laid at a time, but a female can lay multiple eggs over the course of a single season, with eggs appearing every four to eight weeks. The diet primarily consists of dry grasses and vegetation.
In crisis
There are also small populations in northern Zambia. The greatest threats facing the pancake tortoise are habitat destruction and its over-exploitation by the pet trade. Given the low reproductive rate of this tortoise, populations that have been harvested may take a long time to recover.
Tortoises in Kenya are threatened by clearance of thorn scrub for conversion to agriculture and in Tanzania by over-grazing of goats and cattle.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Pancake 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 Pancake tortoise, Wikidata item Q832357. 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.
