deformed or extra scutes
- Thread starter kalei01
- Start date
Not at all. But it is saying that when hatching, over 15% of them have abnormal scute. Yet surveying adults they find only about 5% with abnormal scutes. So for some reason mortality is higher with abnormal scutes.
But mortality is much higher than 66%. To maintain a stable population, a pair of animals simply needs to replace themselves with another single breeding pair in their lifetime. More than that leads to population growth and less leads to extinction. Since a female sulcata will produce an average of 2 clutches of 19 eggs in the wild per year, over just a 25 year producing span- she would produce 950 eggs in that timeframe. Egg predation and climate issues could easily destroy half those. But that would still be 475 hatchlings out of which 2 make it to be producing adults - if we have a stable population. If more make it we have a population explosion. If less make it we are on the road to extinction in that area.
If the average producing lifespan of a female is only 10 years, it would be 2 out of 190 make it. If 20 years, 2 out of 380, etc...
But for the purposes of this thread, the ones with abnormal scutes do appear to have 3 times the mortality rate.
Here is my baby. 6 months with a few split scutes looking like a zipper down the back. 
I made a thread for those of us who have these types of tortoises. I hope you all will add your pictures so we can all follow along as the tortoises grow. Let's keep the discussions on the topic here in this thread, but post pictures over there in the other thread:
http://www.tortoiseforum.org/threads/a-thread-for-your-pictures-of-split-or-extra-scutes.155200/
http://www.tortoiseforum.org/threads/a-thread-for-your-pictures-of-split-or-extra-scutes.155200/
here is a picture of my tortoise and is scute
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And you didn't post it on the other, picture, thread because. . . 
