It sounds like the plot of an R-rated sex comedy: a group of creatures is close to extinction and it falls to one male to single-handedly repopulate the endangered species by having sex with as many females as possible – and to ramp up the camp factor, he’s over 100 years old.
However, as Metro and CBS News reported this week, the tale is far from fiction, although the protagonist of this story is not a human. In actuality, he’s Diego the giant tortoise, a centenarian who was transported from the San Diego Zoo to the island of Española in the Galapagos around 50 years ago with the hopes that he would be able to breed with females in the wild.
To say those efforts proved fruitful would be an understatement. In the past five decades, Diego has fathered at least 800 offspring and has been credited with single-handedly saving his species, Chelonoidis hoodensis, according to media outlets. Prior to his arrival, there were only a pair of male turtles and a dozen females, all of whom were too far from one another to mate.
“[Diego’s] a very sexually active male reproducer. He’s contributed enormously to repopulating the island,” Galapagos National Park tortoise preservation specialist Washington Tapia said in an interview with the AFP news agency. “We did a genetic study and we discovered that he was the father of nearly 40 percent of the offspring released into the wild on Espanola.”
Diego’s journey from the Galapagos to the US and back again
The 175-pound, 35-inch long, nearly five-foot tall giant tortoise is the dominant male out of the three assigned to repopulate on Española, the AFP noted. He lives along with six females in an enclosure located at a tortoise breeding center on Santa Cruz Island.
Tapia explained that Diego was discovered at the San Diego Zoo (for which he is named) after his species was determined to be at risk, resulting in an international campaign to locate more of the rare tortoises. Tapia said that it is unclear when he arrived in the US, but that he believes the tortoise was taken by a scientific expedition to Espanola “sometime between 1900 and 1959.”
According to CBS News, he was most likely brought to California by Dr. Harry Wegeforth, the founder of the San Diego Zoo, following one of his two voyages to the Galapagos, one of which took place in 1928 and the other in 1933. The zoo returned him home to Española in 1977, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Thanks largely to his reproductive prowess, there are now more than 2,000 giant tortoises living on the island, meaning that the species is no longer on the brink of extinction. “I wouldn’t say [the species] is in perfect health, because historical records show there probably used to be more than 5,000 tortoises on the island. But it’s a population that’s in pretty good shape – and growing, which is the most important,” Tapia explained.
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Image credit: Rodrigo Buendia
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