Aggressive behavior of tortoises toward their offspring

Can you keep young tortoises inside the same pen as their parents? Better not, apparently.

In this video you can see what happened when our two adult tortoises met their 1-year-old children. According to our experience, adult tortoises seem to completely ignore hatchlings and very young tortoises. But it's a bad idea to keep them together anyway, because at a very young age, tortoises are quite vulnerable and the adults could accidentally hurt them. Later however, as this video shows, adult tortoises become aware of the young ones.
Here, the mother displayed quite a shocking behavior, trying to ram them with her shell (luckily they were too small to be hit) and even mounting them and hissing, something you'd expect from a male tortoise during mating.
The father behaved less aggressively, he only sniffed at the young ones and pursued them. Eventually he tried to bite, though (not recorded).

It's likely (but not certain) that the young tortoises are females, so perhaps the mother saw them as rivals while the father saw them as potential mates. Anyway, if someone has any insight to share on this behavior, I'd love to hear it.

Category:

Pets & Animals

Tags:

• aggressive
• behavior
• tortoise
• turtle
• testudo
• hermanni
• boettgeri

[asfpunk]

we have russian tortoises. behaviour is quite different. the adult ones ignore the hatchlings completely. we had a time when a foreign tortoise entered their domain, the male adult ones protected the babys against the foreign animal. two of our babys are pubescent now, but no problems here. our hatchlings could live with the adult ones (but as the size difference is too big, I won't let them yet)

[THBfriend]

@asfpunk Thanks for your comment. Our adult torts ignore hatchlings, too. But the torts in this video aren't hatchlings. This behavior also depends on the size of the pen, I guess. If it's relatively small like ours, they might be more territorial. Anyway, I don't think it's a good idea to keep very young torts or even hatchlings in the same pen as adults, it's just too dangerous (again, if the pen is large, then it might work). I've never heard of Russian torts protecting their young.

[tofu4tortoise]

why would the parents ram their offspring?

[THBfriend]

Your guess is as good as mine. Since these tortoises don't do any brood care, they're probably oblivious to the fact that they even have children. So they treat them like they'd treat any other tortoise.

[asfpunk]

@THBfriend yeah it was quite confusing to see this "protecting" behaviour. the foreign tortoise wanted to bite and ram our little ones and our two male adult tortoises went in front of the babys and bit/rammed the foreign one until it went away. Also it tried to bite the babys from several sites. Well we have babys from different age now, but the adult ones would just ignore them all. Perhaps its really a matter of the pen size. Who knows what they are thinking sometimes :-)

[billnyesyourmom]

the mama tried to bite the little ones hed off at 1:02

[markyyyyyyyy321]

Hes trying to mate with the baby tortoise. The little ones trying to run away like its not old enough!

[tofu4tortoise]

I thought tortoises only show aggression in mating.  I guess im wrong. :\