Stories tagged tuatara

Henry: His own bad self.
Courtesy KeresHWe live in exciting times, Buzzketeers, exciting times! Never before has the population of the world been so thrilled to see a 111-year-old get it on.

I’m talking sex here, folks. Sex.

Yes, the world has carefully peeled its eyeballs from now-damp television screens across every continent, forgoing the stale gender isolation that is the summer Olympics for the steamy, primordial, and sexy land of iniquity we call Middle Earth. I mean New Zealand.

This feisty Casanova had everything going against him and his love live. Aside from his formidable age, he only recently got out of 17 years of solitary confinement, a punishment given for an aggression problem that culminated in him giving a serious bite to a lady—the very lady that would become his baby’s momma all these years later! Why do we love the ones that hurt us the most? On top of all this, the centenarian, name o’ Henry, has scaly lizard skin, and was born with a third eye. Also, he had a tumor on his butt until the recent past. And he’s a lizard, which can’t help things.

Or not a lizard, precisely, but a tuatara. Tuatara made an appearance on Science Buzz not long ago, regarding their status as not-exactly-lizards, and potential their inability to survive in our spicy hot new world.

Well, Henry the tuatara and his 70-something lady friend, Mildred, are doing their best to prove us wrong (about the viability thing, not the lizard thing). Henry, never before observed mating in his long life, is now the father of 11 eggs. How many of these eggs actually hatch remains to be seen, of course. Whether they yield a healthy ratio of males-to-females (see the Buzz link above) may be up in the air too, although the fact that they were laid in captivity probably means that they’re being carefully incubated in the appropriate temperature range for developing embryos of both sexes.

Oh, gold medals all around!

Tags : tuatara, captivity, breeding, oldest

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Going, going, gone?: Will global warming doom the tuatara?
Courtesy Andrew_mrt1976

The tuatara looks like a lizard, but it ain’t. It actually split off from the lizard family tree some 200 million years ago, frolicked with the dinosaurs, and is considered a “living fossil.”

How much longer it will go on living is a matter of some debate. Restricted to a few small islands off New Zealand, the tuatara has long been classified as a vulnerable species. But some researchers feel it faces a new threat: global warming.

Many reptile reproductive systems are tuned to temperature. If the weather is warm, a male hatches. If the climate is cold, the egg produces a female. Some researchers fear that warming temperatures will lead to nothing but male tuataras within 75 years, ending the species’ 200-million-year run.

Most of the article is hidden behind a subscription wall, so I don’t know if the researchers ever get around to explaining how the tuatara survived the much, much warmer temperatures of the Mesozoic, and the much, much cooler temperatures of the Ice Ages, without going extinct then, too. But I’m sure it’s a beautiful explanation, though.

Tags : tuatara, global warming, climate change, New Zealand

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