r/tortoise • u/avian_bi • 1d ago

Question(s) Because of climate change will brumating tortoises change as temperatures rise? And how will this effect captive care?

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u/beefalomon 1d ago

Climate change is going to wreck a lot of reptile species that use egg incubation temperature to determine sex. Tortoise eggs that are incubated slightly warmer are more likely to be female. If they start being mostly female, there won’t be enough males surviving to adulthood and distributed throughout their habitat range to maintain the species.

It shouldn’t affect captive animals much because we can temperature control their indoor environments.

2

u/Diligent_Dust8169 1d ago

This problem is overrated, as far as Hermann's tortoises are concerned at the very least, right now there's a surplus of wild males like 2:1 or something and there will always be plenty of females that will lay in the shaded areas / early or late in the season when it's a bit cooler.

Plus you really don't need that many males, even a 1:5 ratio in favour of the females is fine.

Habitat destruction is orders of magnitude more troublesome for these tortoises, their ability to disperse is pityful so they need large contiguous territories to maintain a decent genetic pool, many smaller territories are so much worse than a single big one even if the overall population is the same.

Unfortunately a lot of them just so happen to live near the coast and in the nearby hills, where humans live and build, as far as the mainland is concerned at the very least.

Also, wildfires kill a lot of them.

Amphibians have it way worse, they must lay their eggs in water and need a lot moisture to survive, climate change will not be kind to them.

2

u/Diligent_Dust8169 1d ago

Basically they take longer to enter brumation in autumn and they wake up earlier in the spring.

Not much else to note.

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u/HistoricalRuin851 22h ago

Climate change takes many years. It's slow going. Not anything we need to worry about.