00:04The Desert Tortoise Conservation Center is actually a partnership between the
00:07Fish and Wildlife Service, the Nevada Department of Wildlife, Bureau of Land
00:11Management, and now with the San Diego Zoo. Well, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
00:15wanted to partner with the San Diego Zoo because there's been a lot of work
00:19done here at the Tortoise Center to try to help recover the tortoise, but we
00:23needed someone who could come in and really make an impact in terms of animal
00:26care and real forward-thinking research, and the San Diego Zoo really is the
00:30best place to help us do that. The Desert Tortoise Hotline is a service provided by
00:36Clark County in Southern Nevada that removes tortoises in areas that are
00:40potentially in conflict with with the development for urbanization of Clark
00:44County. We realize that people like to keep tortoises as pets, but we discourage
00:49that as an activity. Tortoises are a wild animal. However, if you do have tortoises
00:54in your backyard, we would ask you please not to breed them. The baby tortoises are
00:58very difficult to put into a good condition for release, and wild tortoises
01:02make a better release candidate than babies bred in your backyard. When the
01:07tortoises arrive off the hotline, we bring them in and each gets an individual ID
01:11number so we can track them for the whole time that they're here. Then we also weigh
01:15them and we measure them and we go through a health assessment so we can
01:17visually inspect them and see if they need immediate veterinary care. We also take a
01:21blood sample and that blood sample gets sent out and it tests for a specific
01:26disease that desert tortoises are susceptible to called upper respiratory
01:30tract disease. We have as many as 1,200 tortoises on site here during peak season
01:35and during off-season, which is the winter time, we have anywhere up to three or four
01:39hundred tortoises here. Well, desert tortoises are faced with a number of threats.
01:45There's human encroachment onto their habitat both through real estate
01:48development and through recreational activities like ATVing. When people go
01:52off-roads, they actually can go across desert tortoise habitat and not only run
01:56over tortoises, but they compact the soil which prevents the vegetation from
02:00growing so the tortoises don't have anything to eat. They also have other
02:04threats that are natural in the desert like raven predation. Ravens love to eat
02:08little hatchlings and because of the drought we've had over the past several
02:12years, there are other animals that are now eating tortoises that didn't used to
02:15eat them like coyotes. Well, we should all care about tortoises because they're a
02:21direct reflection of what's going on in the desert. They provide protection for
02:25other species with their burrows. They also spread seeds throughout the desert so
02:29they revegetate where they've already eaten and they're really just a reflection
02:32of the health of the desert and really a symbol for all of us to appreciate the
02:36desert. The goal of the San Diego Zoo at the Tortoise Center is to not only
02:42provide the best animal care that we can for these tortoises, but also to do
02:45research to help in the recovery of these animals and ultimately release them
02:48back to the wild in the Mojave Desert where they should be.
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