Leopard Tortoise

About the leopard tortoise

The leopard tortoise is a large, boldly marked tortoise of the African savanna, found from Sudan south to the Cape Province at the continent's southern tip. It's the fourth-largest tortoise species in the world and the only living member of the genus Stigmochelys, a name built from Greek words for "mark" and "tortoise." The species name pardalis comes from the Latin for "leopard," a reference to the spotted pattern across its shell. That taxonomy took a while to settle: over the decades, scientists have placed the species in four different genera — Geochelone, Stigmochelys, Centrochelys, and Psammobates — before the current classification took hold. Researchers once also recognized two subspecies, but more recent work found the differences between them don't hold up.

The carapace, or upper shell, is high, domed, and nearly vertical along its sides. Juveniles and young adults wear a striking pattern of black blotches, spots, dashes, and stripes over a yellow background, which is where the "leopard" name comes from; as tortoises mature, those markings tend to fade into a plainer brown or gray. The head and limbs stay a fairly uniform yellow, tan, or brown throughout the tortoise's life.

Leopard tortoises are grazers by nature, favoring open, semiarid, thorny-to-grassland habitat, and in extreme heat or cold they will shelter in burrows abandoned by foxes, jackals, or aardvarks rather than digging their own — the only digging a leopard tortoise does on its own is to make a nest for eggs.

Behavior and diet

As grazers, leopard tortoises eat a wide range of plants: forbs, thistles, grasses, and succulents, along with berries and other fruit when they're available. They will also gnaw on bones, ash, or even hyena feces to get calcium, which their bodies need for both bone growth and eggshell formation. Because tortoise digestion doesn't break down every seed a tortoise swallows, the species plays a real role in dispersing seeds across the landscape as it moves and defecates. Leopard tortoises are normally active by day but slow down during hot weather or the dry season.

The species doesn't reach sexual maturity until 12 to 15 years of age, and individuals may live 80 to 100 years. During the breeding season, males compete for females by ramming and butting rivals, then trail females — sometimes over long distances — often ramming a female into submission before mating; males grunt while mating. Nesting runs from May to October, when a female digs a hole and lays a clutch of five to 30 eggs, and a single female may lay five to seven clutches in one season. Incubation is slow, taking eight to 15 months depending on temperature. Eggs and hatchlings face a long list of predators, including rock monitors, puff adders, jackals, and crows, while adult leopard tortoises have few natural predators — though lions and hyenas have occasionally been recorded killing one.

Range and habitat

Leopard tortoises range widely across the arid and savanna regions of eastern and southern Africa, from South Sudan and Somalia through East Africa down to South Africa and Namibia, though the species is largely absent from the humid forest belt of Central Africa. Within that range it occupies the broadest variety of habitats of any African tortoise — grassland, thorn-scrub, mesic brushland, and savanna — and turns up at elevations anywhere from sea level up to 9,500 ft (2,900 m).

Conservation status

The leopard tortoise is listed as Least Concern and remains common across most of its range. Agricultural burning, hunting for consumption, and commercial collection for the pet trade are all recognized pressures, but none has yet driven a significant population decline. Captive breeding has increasingly replaced wild collection to supply the pet trade — most tortoises exported from Kenya and Tanzania today are captive-bred rather than wild-caught. The species has been listed under Appendix II of CITES since 1975, and in 2000 the United States banned leopard tortoise imports outright, a measure aimed at keeping out heartwater, an infectious disease carried by tortoise ticks that could threaten the U.S. livestock industry.