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It's Gopher Tortoise Day - National Fish and Wildlife Foundation's and International Paper's Forestland Stewards Partnership Helps The Longleaf Alliance Give Gopher Tortoises a Head Start
NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / April 10, 2023 / The best way to celebrate Gopher Tortoise Day is...
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[{"type":"text","content":"It’s Gopher Tortoise Day - National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s and International Paper’s Forestland Stewards Partnership Helps The Longleaf Alliance Give Gopher Tortoises a Head StartNORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / April 10, 2023 / The best way to celebrate Gopher Tortoise Day is to ensure there are more gopher tortoises across their natural range in the southeast. The Forestland Stewards Partnership between the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) and International Paper, founded in 2013, provides conservation grants to restore and conserve gopher tortoise populations and longleaf habitat.Helping gopher tortoises to thrive isn't just good news for tortoises; it also means good news for hundreds of other species that depend in big and small ways on the tortoise in its role as a keystone species. \"They are called a ‘keystone species' because more than 350 other animals - like owls, snakes, foxes, toads, skunks, and lizards - use gopher tortoise burrows to shelter from the heat, fires, and predators,\" says Kurt Buhlmann, Senior Research Associate at the University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory. Gopher tortoises spend most of their lives in burrows that can be more than 20-feet long and eight-feet deep.Forestland Stewards Partnership grants are helping gopher tortoises and their habitat by supporting collaboration between The Longleaf Alliance, the University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, and the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. These organizations are augmenting and restoring gopher tortoise populations through a technique called \"head-starting.\" About 350 eggs have been collected from wild populations to hatch in captivity. Hatchling tortoises are reared indoors for one year to achieve larger body sizes than would occur naturally, and thus become more resistant to predation. This gives tortoises a greater chance to survive, and eventually become subadults.Head-starting increases survival\"Hatchling tortoises have naturally low survival in the wild. Raccoons, coyotes, and other predators often eat tortoise eggs and hatchlings, and mortality rates can be as high as 95%,\" says Lisa Lord, Conservation Programs Director at The Longleaf Alliance. \"The head-started juveniles are about a year old - but the size of wild 3-to-4-year-olds - when r...