The owners are wondering how old their pet is, in those cases if it fell into their hands from random people. To know how to determine the age of land turtles, you need to know the structure of their shell.
Turtles in nature
First, get acquainted with the land tortoise itself, because before you get this reptile in the house, you need to at least learn a little about it. So, the land tortoise, it is also Central Asian, it is also steppe. Although it is called the steppe, but the native habitat of this species are the deserts of Central Asia.
Turtles feed on plant foods. In winter they hibernate. Maturity occurs at about ten years of age. The female lays several eggs, but not all at once, but with an interval of two days. Newborn turtles are only 30 mm long. It is interesting that, only when they were born, they immediately burrow into the ground, where they winter, and in spring they go free.
Turtle structure
This reptile has four limbs, with the forelimbs being four-fingered. The carapace is round and low, its color can be various shades of yellow-brown or yellow-green, with black or brown spots on each shield. This color allows you to perfectly mask among the sands and dry grass.
How to determine the age of the tortoise land? One of the ways - on the guards of her shell. It consists of carapace (dorsal) and plastron (abdominal). In newborn turtles, the shell is soft, gradually it hardens. Plastron is divided into 16 shields. Karapaks has 13 central scutes, 25 more are located on the sides, smaller in size.
On the shields of the carapace there are grooves that resemble circles on a cut of a tree. Now you guessed how to determine the age of the land tortoise? Yes, exactly the same as the age of the tree - on the rings.
Determining the age of a turtle in two ways
So, the first way to determine the age of a land tortoise is through concentric rings. They appear on the shields of small turtles already in the first year of life. Moreover, in the first two years, their growth is very intensive, one furrow on the shell appears after 3-6 months, and then 1 or 2 rings per year. It is difficult to find out how old the old representatives of this species are, since the carapace becomes smooth, and the grooves are almost invisible.
To make the answer more accurate, you can count the rings on 3-5 shields, and then calculate the average value. This method does not give a 100% result, because domestic turtles lead a completely different lifestyle than in the natural environment.
Their development is greatly influenced by the conditions of detention, as well as whether they sleep in winter. Domestic turtles reach puberty much earlier than their relatives living in natural conditions and live longer (up to 20, and under favorable conditions, up to 30 years).
There is another way to determine the age of a land tortoise. To do this, measure the length of the shell with a ruler. It is known that up to ten years,
these reptiles grow quite quickly. When reaching a length of about 18-20 cm, their growth slows down and remains almost unchanged. Although in nature there are specimens measuring about 30 cm.
Newborn turtles have a length of 3 cm, during the year their growth is almost doubled (5 cm), and each subsequent year of life adds about 2 cm. Females are much larger in size than males. We will make simple calculations and find out how to determine the age of a land tortoise: if, for example, the length of the shell of an animal is 14 cm, then it is about 6 years old.
Of course, these methods of determining age are very approximate, but using both of them, you can at least roughly find out how long your pet has lived in the world.