A turtle re-population program in New South Wales had a happy surprise recently. 7 endangered bells turtles were successfully hatched, from six eggs.
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00:00 I was checking all the egg boxes. We actually hatched out 254 Bell's Turtle hatchlings this
00:07 season, but in one of the boxes we had six eggs and seven hatchlings. And so I had a
00:13 bit of an investigation and realised that two of the hatchlings had come out of the
00:17 one egg and they were about half the size of their siblings.
00:22 That's a rare event, isn't it? Have you heard of it happening before? Was there any research
00:26 on Bell's Turtle twins? There's no research on Bell's Turtle twins.
00:31 This is the first set of twins we've had. We've produced 3,000 hatchlings over the last
00:35 few years and this is our first set of twins. But twins, they do occur across other species
00:42 of turtles. I know that alligator snapping turtles, they have, I think the rate is one,
00:48 no, three in a thousand. But for us, this is our first set of twins out of 3,000.
00:54 As well as being a bit small, are they doing okay?
00:57 They're doing fine. They've actually been released. As of yesterday, all of their hatchlings
01:02 have gone back out into the wild, back to where their mothers were caught. So hopefully
01:06 in a few years' time, they'll be turning up in our surveys. They take about 20 years to
01:11 mature, so in about 20 years' time, they'll be laying eggs of their own.
01:15 So how's the overall repopulation program going? How many turtles have you put back
01:19 in total into the local area? We've done 3,000 over the last few years
01:26 by incubating eggs in our lab. And I've been protecting nests in the wild from fox predation
01:30 as well. So about 3,000 hatchlings have gone in from that as well. So about 6,000 in total
01:34 so far. And this program will continue into the future. There's funding from Northern
01:40 Tablelands Local Land Services to continue on with this project.
01:45 Why are they being released then? Because there's been a change of location this year,
01:50 hasn't there, Louise? Yeah. In the past, we've been concentrating
01:53 on the Nemoy and the Gwydir River systems, but this year, we've identified that there's
01:58 quite not only a lack of juveniles in the Beardee and Seven River systems, there's also
02:07 a lack of all sorts of life stages. The turtles that remain in the Seven and the Beardee waters
02:12 are very old and very few and far between. So we've decided to try and reinforce that
02:19 population as quickly as possible. And why is the Bell's turtle in danger then,
02:24 Louise? You mentioned fox predation. Are there any other reasons?
02:27 Yeah. So at the moment, fox predation is a really high pressure on the Bell's turtles
02:33 because they're raiding more than 97% of Bell's turtle nests every season. But of course,
02:38 there's in-stream mortality of hatchlings as well in terms of fish and birds. We also
02:44 find that Bell's turtles have a little bit of a problem with fisher people. They get
02:50 tangled in line. And also, I think sometimes fisher people don't particularly enjoy catching
02:56 turtles on their line. And also, habitat degradation and drought.
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