Tortoise of Kemp

The tortoise of Kemp ( Lepidochelys kempii ), or bastard tortoise , is the smallest species of Tortue marinades. The species is strongly threatened of disappearance.

Description

Appearance

The tortoise of Kemp and the Tortue olivâtre are the smallest species of marine tortoise, and measure between 58 and 70 cm. The Lepidochelys weigh from 36 to 45 kg. The tortoise of Kemp is recognizable with its green-gray backing. it is different from the tortoise olivâtre by a carapace less convex. Its horn nozzle which can be finely dentil.

Food

Adult, it consumes Crustacé S, of which it breaks the carapace with its powerful nozzle but also of fish, of the Céphalopode S, the shells. No study shows that they eat marine plants.

Reproduction

The age of sexual maturation is discussed, certain announce ten years, others 35 years. Single fact among the marine tortoises, it would seem that the males do not migrate.

Arribada

The season of reproduction takes place between April at June, but can continue until August. It niche almost exclusively in the Gulf of Mexico, mainly on a beach in the north of Tampico in the state of the Tamaulipas but sometimes also on Padre island with the Texas. It waits to lay until a strong wind blows of north and preferentially accosts the overhung beaches of dunes and broadsides downstream from a Marais. The Lepidochelys are the only species of marine tortoise to prefer to lay day.

The females nest approximately three times per season all the 10 to 28 days. Incubation, according to the temperature little to take 45 to 70 days. It lays on average 110 eggs by accosting.

As for the other tortoises, the sex of the embryos is determined by the temperature at a certain period of maturation: the small ones will be male for a temperature lower than 29,5 °C.

Systematic

This tortoise is called “ tortoise of Kemp ” in the honor of Richard Kemp, the citizen of Key West in Florida which forwarded a specimen to Samuel Garman of Harvard so that it identifies it. The two species of Lepidochelys divide the vernacular Nom of “ bastard tortoise ”.

The relative evolutionary independent groups are described below by philogénie according to Hirayama, 1997,1998, Lapparent de Broin, 2000, and Parham, 2005:

Chorology

Distribution

Although one finds this tortoise, smallest of the species marine, in the Atlantic Ocean of Nova Scotia in Mexico and as far as Europe and of course on the site of nesting of the Tamaulipas. The other species of the kind Lepidochelys lives in the Indian Ocean.

One estimated in 1947 at 47000, the number of females reproductive to come to lay. This figure with diving to a few hundreds in the Years 1970 then, thanks to the effort of protection, went back to the surrounding of 1000 females

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