KEYSTONE TORTOISES

     Gopher tortoises are called keystone wildlife because they dig several burrows in their forty acre range that other critters also use when the tortoises abandon them, and when each tortoise is in one of them.  With front claws well-adapted for digging, the tortoises dig their tunnels into sand and loose soil up to fifteen feet long and six feet deep.  These reptiles live in their underground homes to avoid extreme heat and cold, fire and predators.  State laws protect the tortoises, and their burrows.   
     Tortoise burrows shelter scores of other species of creatures small enough to squeeze into them.  Those critters include gopher frogs, indigo snakes, burrowing owls, striped skunks and many species of invertebrates, all of which live in gopher tortoises' range in much of the southeastern United States.
     Gopher tortoises are brown all over, which camouflages them.  The adults' top shells are humped-up and ten inches long.  Baby tortoises are brown, too, but each section of their top shell has a yellow spot.  But as each tortoise gets older, the yellow spots disappear.  
     Strict vegetarians, gopher tortoises mostly ingest grass, which is common and easy to obtain.  But they also consume fruits and flowers, when and where they are available.  
     Gopher tortoises mate from February to September, with a peak of mating in May and June.  They mature when ten to fifteen years old.  Males court by bobbing their heads toward a female.  And each female annually lays a clutch of three to twenty eggs in a pile of sand or soil near the entrance to her den.
     From April to November, young tortoises hatch after an incubation of seventy to one hundred days.  But nine-banded armadillos, striped skunks, raccoons, gray foxes and other critters eat many clutches of eggs.  And many small young are consumed by those same species, plus alligators and others.  But the few tortoises that grow to maturity live up to forty years.  Unfortunately, storms and development take their toll of young and adults alike.  
     Gopher tortoises are important to other wildlife in the southeastern United States.  Those reptiles not only dig homes for themselves, but many other species of critters as well.  Gopher tortoises deserve to be protected, and left alone.  They have enough troubles without people adding to their burdens.     

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