Common box turtle
Terrapene carolina
— Where the name comes from
Terrapene comes from torope, the word the Algonquian peoples of the Atlantic coast used for freshwater turtles; from the same root comes the English terrapin. Carolina names the colonies where it was described. The common name comes from the plastron, which has two hinges and closes completely: the animal turns into a sealed box.
— Facts
- Group
- Reptiles · Reptilia
- Order
- Turtles and tortoises
- Habitat
- Damp woodland, clearings, hedged meadows, marsh edges
- Range
- The eastern United States and Mexico
- Size
- 11–20 cm of carapace, 300–600 g
- Diet
- Earthworms, fungi, berries, snails, insects
- Lifespan
- over 50 years, some past 100
— Characteristics
- 01
Shut inside its shell it is impenetrable even to a raccoon.
- 02
It eats fungi that are poisonous to people without any harm.
- 03
It lives its whole life in a patch of wood a few hundred metres across.
— What sets it apart
It spends its entire life in a territory the size of a couple of football pitches and knows it by heart: moved elsewhere, it walks in a straight line towards home for kilometres if need be, and in doing so it crosses roads. That is why it is disappearing — an animal that lives a hundred years and lays few eggs cannot absorb a steady road death toll, and the species is going extinct slowly, without anyone hunting it.
