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Hi friends,
After a travel to KNP, I am now working on the identification of all the (many) animals we saw. The tortoise in the photos gave me some trouble. I finally identified it as a Speke's hinged tortoise (Kinixys spekii). Do you agree?





Cheers
Charbel

It looks like a very wet Leopard Tortoise, but I would go for Terrapin.
A Serrated Hinge Terrapin.

I thought about a serrated hinged terrapin, but when I look at the pictures at http://www.biodiversityexplorer.org/rep ... nuatus.htm, the shell looks very different....

Charbel

Yep. Puzzled with that too, but as far as I know only the Serrated Hinge Terrapin and the Marsh Terrapin originates in Kruger.

I think there are more tortoises and terrapins there, for instance, we saw many leopard tortoises....

There is a page for Speke's Hinged Tortoise related to Kruger: http://www.krugerpark.co.za/africa_spek ... toise.html

In this page, it is also mentioned in a range of distribution that would include Kruger:
http://nlbif.eti.uva.nl/bis/turtles.php ... ten&id=352

But I agree it is puzzling... What made me think of this species was the elongated carapace... For instance, in the picture shown in the last webpage the carapace looks quite similar...

Cheers
Charbel

Hi...saw plenty of these now in KNP as well as leopard Tortoises and Terrapins. This is definately not a leopard tortoise or a terrapin. I am going for Speke's Hinged Tortoise...Im pretty sure its that.

Yes, I looked at some more website... I definitely go for Speke's hinged tortoise. It is very helpful, anyway, to discuss with you all here. Thanks!

We saw many leopard tortoises crossing the roads in KNP, but only this Speke's hinged tortoise...

One fantastic thing we saw in S44, going from Olifants to Letaba: in a small pond, 23 terrapins and one young nile crocodile just besides our car, the terrapins passing over the crocodile all the time, while it remained rather motionless... but the terrapins funnily moved towards our car with their heads and necks very stretched, looked intensely at all, turned back and returned to water, just for us to watch another set of terrapins coming again.... very interesting indeed!

Do someone else saw this behavior?

Cheers
Charbel

...agreed!

Your post made me double check...never have I seen so many as in December. Maybe 5-7 Speke's Hinged Tortoise in total, mostly close to Skukuza. Great to be interested in everything though, I find it makes the trip so much more rewarding

Anyway this is an interesting sighting you mention..I am sure I read it somewhere on the forum in the last week so if it wasn't you, have a little look. I do remember once seeing a large herd of buffalo go into a small dam and you should have seen the mass exodus of all the terapins crawling out and then one or two buffalo started chasing them. It was really funny!

Keep well

Nice!
We saw this Speke's hinged tortoise in H2-2, going from Pretoriuskop to Afsaal...

Cheers
Charbel

That is a tortoise, and there are only two species of tortoise in KNP, nl. the Leopard and Speke's Hinged.

That is the Speke's.