A tortoise found only in Myanmar’s central dry zone with an ornate shell that is prized by wildlife traffickers has been saved from the brink of extinction with the help of an international collective of conservationists, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) announced this week.
In the mid-1990s, wildlife traffickers supplying markets in southern China set their sights on the Burmese star tortoise, which prized for its meat and medicinal properties. In just a few years, with almost no Burmese star tortoises bred in captivity, hunting wiped out all viable populations in the wild, and the species was declared ecologically extinct.
Fortunately, in 2004, the Nature and Wildlife Conservation Division of Myanmar’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation, in collaboration with WCS and the Turtle Survival Alliance (TSA), collected around 175 animals that had been confiscated from wildlife traffickers and set up three “assurance colonies” to prevent the tortoise’s extinction.
The tortoise colonies were set up in existing wildlife sanctuaries in the central dry zone and were frequently visited by conservationists to determine their husbandry needs, including diet, feeding, reproduction, and hatchling care. Veterinarians and molecular scientists from the Bronx Zoo conducted health screenings of the captive population to help prevent diseases.
Today, the tortoises number over 14,000, and around 750 have been released in the wild areas of the sanctuaries. According to those who worked on the project, the restoration of viable populations of Burmese star tortoise in every protected area in the central dry zone is now biologically attainable. However, large-scale reintroduction will only happen once policies are in place to prevent poaching from threatening the population again.
The effort to save the Burmese star tortoise is described in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed journal Herpetological Review (it’s a journal about reptiles and amphibians).
Steven Platt, the article’s lead author and a herpetologist with WCS’s Myanmar program, said: “This is the modern-day equivalent of saving the bison from extinction. A team of conservationists spearheaded an aggressive captive breeding effort and have brought an animal back from the brink to where it now has the potential to be reintroduced into the wild in large numbers.”
Andrew Walde, the chief operating officer of Turtle Survival Alliance, said: “The Myanmar WCS/TSA partnership is a model chelonian conservation success story. If you had told me more than 10 years ago when the project started that we would have more than 10,000 Burmese star tortoises and that we would have returned nearly a thousand to the wild, I wouldn’t have believed it. It is success stories like this that make all the hard work worth it.”
