Dermatemys mawii turtles Added to Assurance Colony in Belize
In a huge boost to the joint TSA/BFREE campaign to establish a viable captive bred assurance colony of the critically endangered Hicatee (Dermatemys mawii), 19 new adult females were added to the HCRC in June 2016. The original founder population consisted of 22 animals, all but three of which are either males or animals still too small to sex. Although breeding has already occurred and eggs hatched in 2015 and 2016, the skewed sex ratio of adults has made the need for more females clear. The need was answered on 07 June 2016, when the Belize Fisheries Department confiscated 16 Hicatees in the Belize River Valley based on an anonymous tip. Eight of the original 22 founder animals at the HCRC were acquired through Fisheries’confiscations in 2014, after HCRC members had heard of the confiscations on Belize radio and contacted the Fisheries Department. This time, Fisheries contacted HCRC first, inquiring about sending the animals to the captive breeding program. Click the link to read more about this story…
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Who’s Who…
Edward Drinker Cope (1840 โ 1897) was an American paleontologist and comparative anatomist, as well as a noted herpetologist and ichthyologist. He was a prodigious writer, with 1,400 papers published over his lifetime. He discovered, described, and named more than 1,000 vertebrate species, including hundreds of fishes and dozens of dinosaurs. His proposal for the origin of mammalian molars is notable among his theoretical contributions. “Cope’s rule”, however, the hypothesis that mammalian lineages gradually grow larger over geologic time, while named after him, is “neither explicit nor implicit” in his work.
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Photo from TSA.
