Giant Turtle Not Extinct… Yet
A giant turtle, known as the Swinhoe’s soft-shell turtle, has been found in northern Vietnam. Until now, this turtle was thought to be extinct in the wild.
There are only three of these turtles in captivity - two in a Chinese zoo, and one in a lake in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Researchers have spent a long time searching for evidence of this turtle in nature. After three years of searching around lakes and the Red River in northern Vietnam, researchers re-focussed their attention to a lake west of Hanoi. This is where some local residents had claimed to have seen the giant turtle.
Nguyen Xuan Thuan, a field biologist with Education for Nature in Vietnam, found and photographed the turtle. This enabled scientists to confirm that the turtle was in fact, the Swinhoe’s soft-shell turtle. The researchers were sponsored by Cleveland Metroparks Zoo and Cleveland Zoological Society.
The Swinhoe’s soft-shell turtle has legendary status in Vietnam. According to zoo general curator, Geoff Hall:
This is one of those mythical species that people always talked about but no one ever saw
This species has almost been wiped out due to hunters who captured and killed the turtles for food, or to make traditional medicine from their bones. On top of this, nesting habitats along the rivers have been wiped out, and pollution is another big killer. Add all these up and you’ll force a species into extinction.
The Swinhoe’s soft-shell turtle is the largest freshwater turtle in the world. It can weight up to 300 pounds, measure up to 3 feet long, and live for more than 100 years (if not hunted and killed first…). It is also known as the Shanghai soft-shell turtle and the Yangtze soft-shell turtle.
Tags: turtle
