A rangewide phylogeography of Hermann’s tortoise

[TestudoGeek]

Found this today:
http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/institute/fak14/ipmb/phazb/pubwink/2006/04.2006.pdf

And discovered that Hermanni's once roamed Portuguese scrubland:

"While Balearic populations are thought to have been introduced 3000 years ago, other isolated populations in the western Mediterranean are relicts from an originally continuous Upper Pleistocene and Holocene distributio that stretched from Portugal along the Mediterranean coast to the Apennine Peninsula (Cheylan 2001)."

Anyone up for a repopulation project?

 

[Ozric]

Hi Tiago, sounds like a great idea - maybe there would be some EU funding?

Maybe its just me but I did not get anything when I clicked on the link for the uni paper.

 

[TestudoGeek]

Hi Tiago, sounds like a great idea - maybe there would be some EU funding?

I'll have to ask the national institute for nature consevation if they ever thought about repopulating.

Maybe its just me but I did not get anything when I clicked on the link for the uni paper.

try this

(right click and save it to your desktop)

 

[Madkins007]

Uhhhh... why did they 'depopulate'? Habitat loss? Climatic change? Human interference? We used to have tortoises in Nebraska, but even if I pulled a Jurassic Park and pseudo-cloned them, this would not work.

Of course, with global warming and all... maybe it WOULD work! Man I would love to see wild tortoises around here!

 

[Ozric]

Thanks Tiago, I've got that paper now.

Needs time for proper study but in answer to 007's question, human activities and Pleistocene climate change are mentioned as impacting (negatively) on the distribution of this species.

 

[Redfoot NERD]

Too many words with more than 2 syllables for me..