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Natural History Notes: Genus Gopherus
Reprinted from Tortoise Tracks, the newsletter of the Desert Tortoise Preserve Committee, Vol.22, No.2, Summer 2002.
Desert tortoises belong to the turtle family Testudinidea -- the tortoises -- perhaps the most terrestrially adapted family of turtles. Indeed, some species of tortoises, notably the desert tortoise, have taken this adaptation to the extreme, living in some of the harshest, most arid landscapes on earth. The family Testudinidae consists of about 50 species in ten genera, and are distributed across all the continents except Australia and Antarctica. Four species are found in North America, all of which belong to the genus Gopherus. These are the gopher tortoises, so named because of their unique adaptations to a burrowing and digging lifestyle. The gopher tortoises include the desert tortoise (G. agassizii), the Mexican Bolson tortoise (G. flavomarginatus), the Texas tortoise (G. berlandieri), and the Florida gopher tortoise (G. polyphemus). These tortoises inhabit a wide range of habitats, from the hot, humid southeast to the arid environments of northeastern Mexico, southern Texas, and southwestern North America.
Over the years, experts in the field have come to realize that the genus Gopherus includes two sorts of tortoise, separable on the basis of differences in their bone and shell structure. The desert and Texas tortoise fall in one group and the gopher and Bolson tortoise in the other. It has been suggested that these differences were great enough to warrant recognition of two separate genera.
It has long been known that the desert tortoise consists of at least two distinct sub-populations, those west of the Colorado River (the Mojave Population) and those east (the Sonoran Population). But recent genetic information suggests that the Sonoran population may be more closely related to the Texas tortoises (about 1000 miles distant) than they are to the Mojave tortoises just on the other side of the River!
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