In the past I've tried to research the temps in the natural range of the sulcata and come up pretty short. I'm talking 10 or 15 years ago. Well for the past month or so I've been trying again and its a whole lot easier to do now. I've been able to search all sorts of sites, but I found the weather boxes on my Mac Dashboard to be the easiest. I looked at a map of Africa in the areas and countries where sulcatas range and I randomly started typing in city names and most of them come up. I've been watching 6 of them several times a day for several weeks now and its pretty interesting. Now I've never even heard of these cities, and I have no idea if there is a single sulcata tortoise within a 100 miles of any of these, but its interesting none the less. As best I can tell from the maps and book info I've got, the equator is a bit south of the sulcatas range and the Tropic of Cancer more or less bisects the whole sulcata range, so technically, around half of the listed range appears to be NOT in the tropics. My cities are:
Naye, Senegal
Kedougou, Senegal
Markala, Mali
Kaolack, Senegal
Nayala, Sudan
Abeche, Chad
The first five cities have all been in the 90's every day and dropping down into the 50's every night. Since we are talking about the Northern Hemisphere this SHOULD be their winter too. I'm wondering if it gets even hotter in the summer and if the nights don't get so cool in the "summer" over there. The sixth city, Abeche, seems to be like the Phoenix, AZ of Africa. They are 110-114 most of the days I've been watching, but their nights still get into the 50's.
Obviously there is nothing "scientific" about all this, I just find it interesting and thought I would share it with other sulcata people. What I can't get an answer to is when is the "rainy" season over there. Does any one know?
Naye, Senegal
Kedougou, Senegal
Markala, Mali
Kaolack, Senegal
Nayala, Sudan
Abeche, Chad
The first five cities have all been in the 90's every day and dropping down into the 50's every night. Since we are talking about the Northern Hemisphere this SHOULD be their winter too. I'm wondering if it gets even hotter in the summer and if the nights don't get so cool in the "summer" over there. The sixth city, Abeche, seems to be like the Phoenix, AZ of Africa. They are 110-114 most of the days I've been watching, but their nights still get into the 50's.
Obviously there is nothing "scientific" about all this, I just find it interesting and thought I would share it with other sulcata people. What I can't get an answer to is when is the "rainy" season over there. Does any one know?
