Female tortoises ‘walking off cliffs to their doom’ to avoid sexual advances

The animal kingdom is filled with strange behaviours that many humans are unable to understand, but now boffins have discovered a new move from tortoises that has left them baffled

Scientists have unearthed a horrifying new behaviour that tortoises are adapting to in order to avoid mating. Some female tortoises are resorting to hurling themselves off cliffs to avoid relentless sexual advances from males.

New research has discovered that male Hermann’s tortoises are so sexually aggressive in one specific breeding ground that female tortoises have resorted to throwing themselves off cliffs and high ground. Boffins have been left baffled at the behaviour they have seen take place with the animals, but have admitted that there is now a potential crisis with the local tortoise population.

This is as a result of many of the shelled creatures falling to their deaths because of the nonstop female attention. The Seattle Times reported that there are around 1,000 Hermann’s tortoises living on an island on Lake Prespa in North Macedonia.

The vast majority of these tortoises are male, and are known to try and find a mate aggressively, which scientists say is putting female tortoises’ lives at risk.

In a paper published in the Ecology Letters journal last month, researchers have argued that the incessant attention male tortoises are giving to their female counterparts is driving the species to extinction. This is reflected in the gender ratio of tortoises on the island, where there is only one female for every 19 males.

As a way to calm their hormones, many male tortoises would mount each other, but the females would continue to die young and underdeveloped. Researchers soon found this was as a result of several males pursuing just one female.

Dragan Arsovski, from the Macedonian Ecological Society, found that a females are often “literally buried by males” wanting to mate. They were also injured as a result of the males’ desires, with around 75% of the females showing genital injuries.

Things began to get so dire for the female tortoises that scientists saw them fling themselves off cliffs, many times to their deaths. While males did also fall off the cliffs, Arsovski said: “There’s a very significantly higher proportion of females that do die like this.”

Looking to the future, it seems that the species could be doomed to extinction, with predictions putting the last female on the island to die in 2083. Jeanine Refsnider from the University of Toledo in Ohio, who was not involved in the research, admitted that the males are single-handedly causing their own downfall.

She explained that due to the high number of males, they “actually seem to be causing an extinction vortex” due to their aggressive mating behaviour. “I’ve never heard of anything like that,” she said, “it’s really unusual and disturbing, but it’s really fascinating.”

However, there is still hope for the tortoises, as there are plenty of healthy animals on the mainland not far from the island. But scientists are now working to establish how the tortoises made it onto the island, with Arsovski admitting: “We have no idea where they came from”.

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