Once-endangered giant tortoises now number more than 180,000 individuals in the Seychelles.
The Aldabra giant tortoise (Aldabrachelys gigantea) was heavily exploited in the 19th century on its namesake atoll and nearby islands, bringing numbers down to less than 1,000 individuals. But a recovery program on Aldabra Atoll that set the island up as a nature reserve in 1981 has helped the population to recover.
The population reached 100,000 by the 1990s. Surveys conducted between 2018 and 2022 have revealed that figure nearly doubled to 183,000 individuals. “This is wonderful news for Seychelles, for the world and for everyone who has worked to protect Aldabra,” Frauke Fleischer-Dogley, CEO of the Seychelles Islands Foundation and a coauthor of the study published in Ecology and Evolution, told The Guardian.
