A community in southern Madagascar has pulled together to save thousands of critically endangered tortoises swept away from their sanctuary and left swimming for their lives in floods this month caused by a tropical cyclone.
The 12,000 radiated and spider tortoises that were housed at the Lavavolo Tortoise Center had been confiscated from illegal wildlife traffickers, but faced a new and unexpected ordeal when Cyclone Dikeledi hit the southern part of the Indian Ocean island this month.
A meter-high flood waters engulfed the sanctuary, and the tortoises — many of them mere whippersnappers in the tortoise world at about 25 to 50 years old — were carried away.
Photo: Lavavolo Tortoise Center via AP
Sanctuary staff, members of the community and even police officers joined together in a rescue operation, wading through the water with large containers to collect the bewildered tortoises. Some rescuers converted damaged building structures into makeshift rafts for the tortoises to ride on as they moved around to find others.
Hery Razafimamonjiraibe, the Madagascar director for the Turtle Survival Alliance, which runs the sanctuary, said they were optimistic that they had saved more than 10,000 tortoises, although they still had to do an official count.
That is not easy, he said, as tortoises can move faster than you think when they want to and rarely cooperate.
The rescuers had recovered about 700 dead tortoises so far, which Razafimamonjiraibe said were trapped by rocks and debris in the floods.
“Fortunately, most of the tortoises were able to float,” Razafimamonjiraibe said.
“Tortoises are actually very good swimmers,” he added. “You should see them.”
While most of the tortoises have been returned to the sanctuary, the floods were a blow to the center, which has lost much of its infrastructure, the Turtle Survival Alliance said.
Lavavolo Tortoise Center underwent a major renovation in 2018 when authorities seized a group of 10,000 radiated tortoises from wildlife traffickers and needed somewhere to keep them. More confiscated tortoises arrived later.
Most of the tortoises at Lavavolo are radiated tortoises, which are native to Madagascar. They generally grow to about 30cm in length, but are long-lived and can reach 100 years or more.
British explorer Captain James Cook is believed to have given a radiated tortoise to the Tongan royal family as a gift in 1777. The tortoise reportedly died in 1966 at the age of 188.
Radiated and spider tortoises are critically endangered in Madagascar because of habitat destruction and poaching. They are eaten, but also illegally trafficked to be sold as pets because of the striking yellow and black markings on their shells, Razafimamonjiraibe said.
There were once tens of millions of radiated tortoises in Madagascar, the Turtle Alliance said, but their numbers have been drastically reduced, and they have disappeared from 65 percent of their natural habitat.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
SUPERFAN: The Japanese PM played keyboard in a Deep Purple tribute band in middle school and then switched to drums at university, she told the British rock band Legendary British rock band Deep Purple yesterday made Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s day with a brief visit to their high-profile superfan as they returned to the nation they first toured more than half a century ago. Takaichi’s reputation as an amateur drummer, and a fan of hard rock and heavy metal has been well documented, and she has referred to Deep Purple as one of her favorite bands along with the likes of Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden. “You are my god,” a giddy Takaichi said in English to Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice, presenting him with a set of made-in-Japan
RSS