Endangered
Spiny turtle
Heosemys spinosa
The spiny turtle is a South-East Asian turtle species.
Appearance
The spiny turtle is a medium-sized tortoise with a brown shell and red-spotted head. As juvenile spiny turtles become adults, the black striped and yellow underside of their shell fades in color.
Range and habitat
It lives along brooks in forested areas, usually in mountains with altitudes of 170 m to 1,000 m above sea level. It inhabits lowland and hill rainforest, usually dwelling in the vicinity of small streams in hill areas up to 1,000 m above sea level. It is found in Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, India, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The spiny turtle buries itself in leaf litter to camouflage during the day and only emerges at night, foraging for food. While often portrayed as a herbivore, the spiny turtle also eats carrion and insects alongside fruits and plants.
Regarding nesting behavior in the wild, the female lays one or two eggs in a nest and produces up to three clutches annually. To ease the delivery of the egg, a hinge forms in the female turtle's plastron before it is laid.
In crisis
Labeled as "vulnerable" by the IUCN in 1996, the spiny turtle became endangered in 2000 when the supply of the species declined by a half in the Chinese food market. It is suggested that the main threat to the spiny turtle has been the destruction of natural forests to create oil palm plantations, common in southern Myanmar. The spiny turtle's participation in the international pet trade and its use in traditional Chinese medicine has also led to its decline.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Spiny 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 Spiny turtle, Wikidata item Q2532001. 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.
