’Twixt Plated Decks
OPPOSITE
The turtle lives ’twixt plated decks
Which practically conceal its sex.
I think it clever of the turtle
In such a fix to be so fertile.
The ultimate product
of turtle reproduction:
a Hermann’s Tortoise
struggles out of its shell.
The ultimate goal of any living creature is to reproduce its kind. Turtles
have extracted themselves from Ogden Nash’s “fix” not by cleverness,
but through a range of life history strategies. These strategies raise the
chances that turtles will not only mate, but produce young that will sur-
vive to reproduce in their turn.
No turtle gives birth to living young. Males have nothing to do with
the reproductive process after they have finished mating except in the
Asian Brown Tortoise (Manouria emys), which guards its nest mound.
Most females pay not the slightest attention to their eggs or young
after laying, though C.M. Gienger and C. Richard Tracy have observed
Agassiz’s Desert Tortoises (Gopherus agassizi) near Lake Mead, Nevada,
chasing Gila Monsters (Heloderma suspectum) out of their nesting bur-
rows (which the lizards sometimes share despite being major egg preda-
tors) or blocking their entry with their bodies (not always successfully).
There is an old report of a captive Inaguan Turtle (Trachemys stejnegeri
malonei) that supposedly helped release her newly hatched young by dig-
ging away the hard soil over her nest. Otherwise, everything that a turtle
contributes to help her offspring survive she must provide before her
eggs begin to incubate—with a single remarkable exception.