Meet the Tuatara:
Tuataras are living fossils in more than one sense of the term. Through long-term capture, tag and recapture studies that were begun right after World War II, researchers have found that tuataras match and possibly exceed in attainable life span that other Methuselah of the animal kingdom, the giant tortoise. “Tuataras routinely live to 100, and I couldn’t tell you they don’t live to 150, 200 years or even more,” said Dr. Daugherty.
They live, and live it up. “We know there are females that are still reproducing in their 80s,” said Dr. Daugherty. At the Southland Museum and Art Gallery in Invercargill, New Zealand, a captive male tuatara named Henry, a local celebrity that had been nasty and unruly for decades until a malignancy was removed from his genitals, mated with an 80-year-old female named Mildred, and last year became a first-time father — at the age of 111.
In every way, tuataras are late bloomers and passionate procrastinators. They don’t reach sexual maturity until age 15 to 20. A female needs two or three years to grow a clutch of eggs internally, and takes another seven or eight months after mating before she finally lays those fertilized eggs. Then the eggs incubate in the ground for yet another year before a brood of finger-size baby tuataras will finally hatch. By comparison, the incubation time for the average North American lizard is only four to six weeks. “If these were plants, most lizards would be like weeds, and the tuatara like a sequoia,” said Dr. Daugherty. For all the nobility of the comparison, the tuatara’s stately pace is also its Achilles’ heel, he added. That’s why the reptile today is found only on diligently monitored islands away from the New Zealand mainland, protected from mammals like rats, pigs or stoats that within months could reduce every sequoia equivalent and its seedlings to so much sawdust.
H/T to DarkWaterMuse for the link.
