How to determine the age of a land tortoise? Two simple ways

The owners are wondering how many years their pet, in those cases, if it fell into their hands from random people. To know how to determine the age of land tortoises, you need to know the structure of their shell.

Turtles in the nature

First, we will get acquainted with the most land tortoise, because before you start this reptile in the house, you should at least learn a little about it. So, the land tortoise, it's Central Asian, it's also a steppe turtle . Although it is called steppe, but the native habitat of this species are the deserts of Central Asia.

They feed on turtles with plant food. In winter they hibernate. Sexual maturity occurs at about the age of ten. The female lays several eggs, but not all at once, but at intervals of two days. Newborn bugs have a length of only 30 mm. It is interesting that only when they are born, they immediately burrow into the ground, where they winter, and in the spring they come to freedom.

The structure of the turtle

This reptile has four limbs, with the fore of them four-fingered. Shell is round and low, its color can be different shades of yellow-brown or yellow-green, with black or brown spots on each scutellum. This coloring makes it possible to perfectly mask among the sand and dry grass.

How to determine the age of a tortoise overland? One way - on the flaps of her shell. It consists of carapace (dorsal) and plastron (abdominal). In newborn turtles the shell is soft, gradually it hardens. The plastron is divided into 16 scutes. Carapace has 13 central flaps, on the sides there are 25 more, smaller.

On the carapace flaps there are grooves that resemble circles on a cut of a tree. Now you have guessed how to determine the age of a land tortoise? Yes, exactly the same as the age of the tree - on the rings.

Determining the age of the turtle in two ways

So, the first way to determine the age of a land tortoise is by concentric rings. They appear on the scutes of small turtles already in the first year of life. And in the first two years their growth is very intense, one furrow on the shell appears in 3-6 months, and then - 1 or 2 rings a year. How many years old representatives of this species, it is difficult to know, as the shell becomes smooth, and the groove is almost invisible.

To make the answer more accurate, you can count the rings on 3-5 shields, and then calculate the average value. This method does not give a 100% result, because home turtles are not at all a way of life, as in a natural environment.

Great influence on their development is provided by the conditions of detention, and also whether they sleep in the winter. Home turtles reach puberty much earlier than their relatives living in natural conditions, and live longer (up to 20, and under favorable conditions and up to 30 years).

There is another way of how to determine the age of a land tortoise. To do this, you need to measure the length of the shell with a ruler. It is known that up to ten years these reptiles grow quite rapidly. When the length reaches approximately 18-20 cm, their growth slows down and almost does not change. Although in nature there are specimens about 30 cm in size.

Newborn turtles have a length of 3 cm, for a year their growth increases almost twice (5 cm), and each subsequent year of life adds about 2 cm. Female size is much larger than males. We will make simple calculations and find out how to determine the age of a land tortoise: if, for example, the animal's armor is 14 cm long, then it is about 6 years old.

Of course, these methods of determining the age are very approximate, but applying both, you can at least tentatively find out how long your pet lives in the world.