High early embryo mortality and low hatching success observed in Aldabra giant tortoise populations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In long-lived species, logistical constraints often limit monitoring to adult population censuses, potentially generating data that is biased towards older, more discernible individuals, and obscuring problems occurring at early life stages. Since adult populations of long-lived species can persist for decades despite reduced productivity, declines driven by reproductive failure may remain undetected until sudden population collapses occur. We present preliminary data on fertilisation success, early embryo survival, and hatching success, across one natural and five translocated populations of Aldabra giant tortoises ( Aldabrachelys gigantea ) in the Seychelles. Of 317 eggs from 24 clutches, only 16% successfully hatched. Most failed eggs (97%) were undeveloped, and using recently developed microscopic methods to assess egg fertility, we provide the first population-level comparisons of fertilisation and hatching outcomes for this species. Although sample sizes are limited, our results consistently indicate low and variable hatching success across populations, driven primarily by embryo mortality. Complete clutch failure was common (67%), and among clutches that did experience some degree of hatching success, early embryo mortality was still prevalent. Hatching rates were markedly reduced in translocated populations (0-26%) compared to the natural Aldabra Atoll population (46%) and consistently fell below historical hatching rate estimates (60-80%) reported ∼50 years ago. Although preliminary, these data provide the most accurate estimates of fertility available for Aldabra giant tortoises, as well as the first reproductive success data for any translocated population and the first for Aldabra in the last five decades. Our findings highlight the limitations of relying solely on adult census data for threat assessments in long-lived species. We argue that it is essential to incorporate productivity metrics into monitoring frameworks to improve population vulnerability predictions and inform effective conservation management.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".