He nudged her gently. She nuzzled him back. And, almost as one, the dozen herpetologists, vets, conservationists and zoo officials who were gathered around the enclosure let out a sigh of relief.
He may be 100 years old and she a sprightly 80, but all hope for one of the most critically endangered species on the planet, the Yangtze giant soft-shell turtle, is vested in them. Nature must take its course and, say scientists, the first signs are more than encouraging.
Only four Yangtze turtles are known to exist. Three are male — one in a zoo in Suzhou in Jiangsu Province, one in Vietnam’s famous Hoan Kiem lake in Hanoi and another in the wild in a lake east of Hanoi.
Until recently there was no known female. Barring a miracle, the species was to die out, mirroring the destiny of Lonesome George, the sole survivor of the Galapagos’s Pinta Island tortoises.
The US-based Wildlife Conservation Society sent urgent circulars to every zoo in China asking for information on large turtles. It seemed futile. Repeated searches have yielded no others in the wild and the few specimens recorded in captivity were male or had died.
Then Changsha Zoo in Hunan Province responded. It had a turtle, but had no idea what kind. It had been bought from a travelling circus about 50 years earlier and had spent the past half century alone and largely unnoticed in a man-made pond.
With its stained, leathery shell, it attracted little interest among visitors to the rundown zoo. But its pig-like snout and wide, flattened dorsal shell resembled the photograph on the conservation society circular. Experts rushed to Changsha. Not only was it indeed a Yangtze turtle, but it was female and, though no teenager, she was still fertile.
“Can you imagine the excitement?” asked Paul Calle, the society’s director of zoological health. “There’s four left in the world and only one of them is female. You can’t get much more endangered than that.”
Today China Girl, as she has been affectionately named, is in a specially adapted enclosure at Suzhou Zoo. She was moved three weeks ago and almost immediately the pair began preliminary breeding activities.
The zoo’s pool was divided into three sections, she on one side, he on the other, with the middle empty. On the second day he was moved into the middle section and swam towards her.
“They saw each other and began sniffing each other through the grate,” said Rick Hudson, from the Turtle Survival Alliance. “The day after that the grate was completely removed. The male was following the female when she moved, then she would move away and then come back to him. It was kind of flirtatious.”
“We had mounting attempts within a couple of days,” he said. “We were worried. We didn’t know when either of them last saw another one of their species.
“If it all continues to go well over the next few weeks, she will lay eggs,” Calle said.
Much of the reptile’s gradual demise has been attributed to the sale of its meat, bones and shells.
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