DSC_4201Check out this little dude or dudette!  Pretty small, right?  And although I said “Baby Gopher Tortosie” in the title, I may have lied slightly.  Tadaaa!

This hatchling is probably about two years old, a toddler by human standards.  How can we tell?  Just like a tree, we count its rings!

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Livvy Jones, one of the summer interns here at Archbold, is counting the scutes on the tortoise’s plastron.  That’s the fancy way of saying that she’s counting the plates on the tortoise’s stomach shell.  Each scute represents one year, starting with the birth year, year “0”.

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In the picture above, you can see the individual scutes that are made of keratin, the same material that makes our fingernails. I have highlighted the corners of two sets of scutes to show how they are counted.  The green one is the oldest, and is the shell plate that the tortoise was born with.  The orange one represents the first year of growth, and the little Gopher is currently working on growing the second year in the blue area.  That means that this tortoise is roughly two years old!

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You can also see these growth rings on the carapace, the shell on the tortoise’s back, before they get worn down as the tortoise ages.  Considering Gopher Tortoises have been found to have a life span of greater than 50 years, this one has got a lot of life ahead of it!  Thanks, Livvy, for showing us this neat little guy!

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And don’t worry, folks, once we were done learning and taking some quick measurements (the researchers here do have permits and permission to handle this unique and protected species), we released it back right where we found it.