The Desert Tortoise Conservation Center is actually a partnership between
the official wildlife Service, the Nevada Department of Wildlife
Bureau of Land Management and now with the San Diego
Zoo. Well, us Fish and Wildlife Service wanted
to partner with the San Diego Zoo because there's been
a lot of work done here at the Tortoise Center
to try to help recover the tortoise. But we
needed someone who could come in and really make an
impact in terms of animal care and real forward thinking
research. And the San Diego Zoo really is the
best place to help us do that. The Desert
Tortoise hotline is a service provided by Clark County in
Southern Nevada that removes tortoises in areas that are potentially
in conflict with, with the development for urbanization of
Clark County. We realize that people like to keep
tortoises as pets, but we discourage that as an
activity. Tortoises are a wild animal. However,
if you do have tortoises in your backyard, we
would ask you please not to breed them. The
baby tortoises are very difficult to put into a good
condition for release. And wild tortoises make a better
release candidate than, than babies bred in your backyard
. When the tortoises arrive off the hotline, we
bring them in and each gets an individual ID number
so we can track them for the whole time that
they're here. Then we also weigh them and we
measure them and we go through a health assessment so
we can visually inspect them and see if they need
immediate veterinary care. We also take a blood sample
and that blood sample gets sent out. Um And
it tests for um a specific disease that um desert
tortoises are susceptible to called upper respiratory tract disease.
We have as many as 1200 tortoises on site here
during peak season and during off season, which is
the winter time, we have anywhere up to three
or 400 tortoises here. Desert tortoises are faced with
a number of threats. There's human encroachment onto their
habitat, both through real estate development and through recreational
activities like a TV. When people go off roads
, they actually can go across desert tortoise habitat and
not only run over tortoises, but they compact the
soil which prevents the vegetation from growing. So the
tortoises don't have anything to eat. They also have
other threads that are natural in the desert like Raven
predation. Ravens love to eat little hatchlings. Um
And because of the drought we've had over the past
several years, there are other animals that are now
eating tortoises that didn't used to eat them like coyotes
. Well, we should all care about tortoises because
they're a direct reflection of what's going on in the
desert. They provide protection for other species with their
burrows. They also spread seeds throughout the desert.
So they revegetate where they've already eaten and they're really
just a reflection of the health of the desert and
really a symbol for all of us to appreciate the
desert. The goal of the San Diego Zoo at
the Tortoise Center is to not only provide the best
animal care that we can for these tortoises, but
also to do research to help in the recovery of
these animals and ultimately release them back to the wild
in the Mojave desert where they should be.