Journal of Threatened Taxa | www.threatenedtaxa.org | 26 June 2020 | 12(9): 16170–16172

ISSN 0974-7907 (Online) | ISSN 0974-7893 (Print)

doi: https://doi.org/10.11609/jott.5946.12.9.16170–16172

#5946 | Received 07 April 2020 | Final received 07 May 2020 | Finally accepted 10 May 2020

First distribution record of Elongated Tortoise Indotestudo elongata (Blyth, 1853) (Reptilia: Testudines: Testudinidae) from Bihar, India

Arif ¹, Sourabh Verma ², Ayesha Mohammad Maslehuddin ³, Uttam ⁴, Ambarish Kumar Mall ⁵, Gaurav Ojha ⁶ & Hemkant Roy ⁷

^1,2,5,6,7 Valmiki Tiger Reserve, West Champaran, Bettiah, Bihar 845438, India.

^3,4 Department of Wildlife Sciences, Aligarh Muslim University, Uttar Pradesh 202002, India.

¹ arifsiddiqui329@gmail.com (corresponding author), ² sourabhvermabhu@gmail.com, ³ ayesha.wildlife@gmail.com, ⁴ chaudharyuttam2@gmail.com, ⁵ dfo1vtr@gmail.com, ⁶ dfobettiah2@gmail.com, ⁷ fdvalmikitr@gmail.com

Editor: Raju Vyas, Vadodara, Gurajat, India. Date of publication: 26 June 2020 (online & print)

Citation: Arif, S. Verma, A.M. Maslehuddin, Uttam, A.K. Mall, G. Ojha & H. Roy (2020). First distribution record of Elongated Tortoise Indotestudo elongata (Blyth, 1853) (Reptilia: Testudines: Testudinidae) from Bihar, India. Journal of Threatened Taxa 12(9): 16170–16172. https://doi.org/10.11609/jott.5946.12.9.16170-16172

Copyright: © Arif et al. 2020. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. JoTT allows unrestricted use, reproduction, and distribution of this article in any medium by providing adequate credit to the author(s) and the source of publication.

Funding: The survey was carried out with the help of Valmiki Tiger Reserve, Bihar Forest Department.

Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

Acknowledgements: We are grateful to the Environment, Forest and Climate Change Department, Government of Bihar, and principal chief conservator of forests and chief wildlife warden for their constant support. We are sincerely thankful to the forest staff, Mr. Kundan, Mr. Dara ji, and Mr. Vijay Uraon for their hard work.

India has one of the most diverse chelonian fauna in the world; home to 30 species of freshwater turtles and tortoises and six marine turtles (Das & Gupta 2015). There are a total of five species of tortoises reported from India, viz.: Indotestudo elongata Elongated Tortoise, Manoria emys Asian Giant Tortoise, Indotestudo travancorica Travancore Tortoise, Geochelone elegans Indian Star Tortoise, and Manouria impressa Impressed Tortoise (Das & Gupta 2015; Kundu et al. 2013, 2018). The former two are listed as Critically Endangered and the later three as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

Indotestudo elongata which is listed as Critically Endangered under criterion A2cd (Rahman et al. 2019) by IUCN Red List and under Appendix II of CITES is protected under Schedule IV of Wildlife Protection Act 1972 in India (Das & Gupta 2015; Ihlow et al. 2016). This species is also commonly known as Yellow-headed Tortoise, Yellow Tortoise, Red-nosed Tortoise, and Pineapple Tortoise and is widely distributed across southern and southeastern Asia (Das & Gupta 2015; Rahman et al. 2019). In India, it was first recorded by Anderson (1878–79) near Chaibasa in Singhbhum District of present day Jharkhand State from where later Annandale (1913) collected a specimen of it and described it as Testudo parallelus. In 1983, Edward O. Moll collected two shells from south-west of Chaibasa (Crumly 1988; Swingland & Klemens 1989). There are records of Indotestudo elongata from Corbett National Park in Uttar Pradesh and Jalpaiguri situated in West Bengal also (Frazier 1992). In the east it is found at Dampa Tiger Reserve and Ngengpui Wildlife Sanctuary in Mizoram, Chakrashilla Wildlife Sanctuary in Dhubri District in Assam and Cachar, Karimganj, and Hailakandi districts of Barak Valley, Assam (Das & Gupta 2015). Our sighting is the first record of Indotestudo elongata from the present state of Bihar. However, recent publication of Khan et al. (2020) emphasis there were high probability occurrence of the species in the central Himalaya and the Upper Gangetic Plains including Valmiki Tiger Reserve, Bihar on the basis of environmental niche modelling method, too.

While on routine patrol of the Valmiki Tiger Reserve a tortoise was sighted on 05 June 2019 and 27 June 2019 in the Manguraha range (Image 1) that was subsequently identified as Indotestudo elongata based on descriptions in Tikader & Sharma (1985), Ahmed & Das (2010) and Ihlow et al. (2016 ). The closest published locality record for this species is in Chaibasa situated in West Singhbhum District of current day Jharkhand (Annandale 1913; Swingland & Klemens 1989), which is approximately 615km from Manguraha.

The first sighting took place around 08.27h (27.328⁰N, 84.561⁰E) and the second at 08.50h (27.324⁰N, 84.551⁰E) in an area of moist deciduous forest dominated by Sal Shorea robusta and Indian Laurel Terminalia elliptica trees. Both the sighted individuals were male and were sighted sitting at the location. The elongated carapace and plastron of the sighted individual was yellowish-brown in colour with distinct black blotches in the centre of each scute as described by Blyth (1884) and Ihlow et al. (2016). The sizes of the individuals were 21cm and 29cm and weighed 2kg and 2.9kg, respectively.

For figure & image - - click here

References

Ahmed, M.F. & A. Das (2010). Tortoises and turtles of Northeast India: Saving them from extinction! Survey, assessment of present status and conservation of tortoises and freshwater turtles in Northeast India. Technical Report. Aaranyak, Guwahati, India, xiv+168pp.

Annandale, N. (1913). The tortoises of Chota Nagpur. Records Indian Museum 9(5): 63–78.

Blyth, E. (1853). Notices and descriptions of various reptiles, new or little known. The Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 22: 639–655.

Crumly, C.R. (1988). A nomenclatural history of tortoises (family Testudinidae). Smithsonian Herpetological Information Service, Number 75, 17pp.

Das, K.C. & A. Gupta (2015). New distribution records of tortoises (Chelonia: Testudinidae) from Barak Valley, Assam, northeastern India with notes on ecology and vernacular traditional taxonomy. Journal of Threatened Taxa 7(3): 7017–7023. https://doi.org/10.11609/JoTT.o3623.7017-23

Frazier, J. (1992). The land tortoise in Nepal: a review. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 89(1): 45–54.

Ihlow, F., J.E. Dawson, T. Hartmann & S. Som (2016). Indotestudo elongata (Blyth 1854) – Elongated Tortoise, Yellow-headed Tortoise, Yellow Tortoise. In: Rhodin, A.G.J., P.C.H. Pritchard, P.P. van Dijk, R.A. Saumure, K.A. Buhlmann, J.B. Iverson & R.A. Mittermeier (eds.). Conservation Biology of Freshwater Turtles and Tortoises: A Compilation Project of the IUCN/SSC Tortoise and Freshwater Turtle Specialist Group. Chelonian Research Monographs 5(9): 096.1–14. https://doi.org/10.3854/crm.5.096.elongata.v1.2016, http://www.iucn-tftsg. org/cbftt/

Khan, S., A. Nath & A. Das (2020). The Distribution of the Elongated Tortoise (Indotestudo elongata) on the Indian subcontinent: implications for conservation and management. Herpetological Conservation and Biology 15(1):212–22.

Kundu, S., K.C. Das & S.K. Ghosh (2013). Taxonomic rank of Indian tortoise: revisit with DNA barcoding perspective. DNA Barcodes, Versita 1: 39–45. https://doi.org/10.2478/dna-2013-0003

Kundu, S., V. Kumar, B.H.C.K. Murthy & K. Chandra (2018). Non-native chelonians in the national zoological collections of Zoological Survey of India. Records of the Zoological Survey of India 118(1): 33–38.

Rahman, S., K. Platt, I. Das, B.C. Choudhury, M.F. Ahmed, M. Cota, T. McCormack, R.J. Timmins & S. Singh (2019). Indotestudo elongata (errata version published in 2019). The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2019: e.T10824A152051190. Accessed on 04 March 2020. https://doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2019-1.RLTS.T10824A152051190.en

Swingland, I.R. & M.W. Klemens (eds.) (1989). The Conservation Biology of Tortoises. Occasional Papers of the IUCN Species Survival Commission, No. 5. Gland, Switzerland: IUCN Publications, iv+203pp.

Tikader, B.K. & R.C. Sharma (1985). Handbook Indian Testudines. Zoological Survey of India, Calcutta, 156pp.