First captive breeding of 'Geochelone' sulcata

cdmay

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After some of the other discussions here regarding the earlier captive breeding of sulcata, I got to wondering about when they were first being recorded as captive bred.
The 1979 edition of the International Zoo Yearbook has some photos of (but no actual article that I can find) of captive breeding, nesting and young of the African tortoise, 'Geochelone' sulcata at the Budapest Zoo.
The photo captions says that the zoo has raised the young to seven months so I would then assume that they were produced in either 1978 or even 1977 depending on how long before publication the article was submitted.
Although the photos are in b/w the adult animals shown look really nice.
 

Kapidolo Farms

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cdmay said:
After some of the other discussions here regarding the earlier captive breeding of sulcata, I got to wondering about when they were first being recorded as captive bred.
The 1979 edition of the International Zoo Yearbook has some photos of (but no actual article that I can find) of captive breeding, nesting and young of the African tortoise, 'Geochelone' sulcata at the Budapest Zoo.
The photo captions says that the zoo has raised the young to seven months so I would then assume that they were produced in either 1978 or even 1977 depending on how long before publication the article was submitted.
Although the photos are in b/w the adult animals shown look really nice.

Hey Carl, this is interesting.
 

Tom

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http://media.longnow.org/files/2/REVIVE/Sulcata-6.pdf

About halfway down the article Look for the heading "Sulcatization..." It gives a pretty detailed history of the sulcata in the US including the origins and timeframes of the first breeders. Bill Zovickian, John Behler and Eric Goode all had a hand in it... Bill was in CT at the time he got his first and they came to him from Hawaii.

Apparently they were here in Southern CA in the 60's.

They list the first actual known breeding in San Antonio in 1979, so Budapest would have them beat by a year or two if all this is accurate.
 

cdmay

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Thanks Tom.
Really interesting stuff. Man, James Juvik must 200 years old by now!
 

N2TORTS

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Great thread indeed…interesting to learn about the Sullies and timelines. There was a keeper , Mr. Randy Gallagher of Sunset Beach, NC …who has had a Sullie since the 60’s.
On an interesting note and time frame with another large species, the San Diego Zoo received it’s first Galapagos Tortoise in 1928 , with it’s first successful “ in house” hatching in 1959.
 
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