I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. It had not entered my head that the hinge-backed tortoises of the West and Central African forests loom large in the bushmeat trade until I read a paper published last year in Herpetological Journal. Numbers of both species involved, Forest Hinge-backed Tortoise, Kinixys erosa, and Home’s Hinge-backed Tortoise, K. homeana, have decreased markedly in recent decades. Habitat loss, collection for human food and for collection for the inaccurately titled ‘pet’ trade have all been blamed for the decline.
The paper reported interviews with people in Côte d’Ivoire, Togo and Nigeria. Confirmation of major declines in population were obtained in Togo and Nigeria. The interesting point to emerge is that these tortoises are collected from the forest by gatherers of snails—also for human consumption. Thus one might expect the number of wild snails for sale in a shop to be positively correlated with the number tortoises on sale. That prediction was confirmed.
The authors made the point that snail gatherers pose more of a danger to tortoises than ordinary hunters for bushmeat. Snails and tortoises occupy the same microhabitat and searches for one are bound to reveal the other.
More about Kinixys tortoises here.
Kinixys homeana
Luiselli L, Dendi D, Pacini N, Amadi N, Akani GC, Eniang EA, Ségniagbeto GH. 2018. Interviews on the status of West African forest tortoises (genus Kinixys), including preliminary data on the effect of snail gatherers on their trade. Herpetological Journal 28, 171-177.
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