Vietnam’s struggling population of spotted softshell turtles received a helping hand in December 2023 when researchers released 50 captive-bred hatchlings into a freshwater lake in a northern province. Now, new research indicates where further wild releases could result in the most conservation gains for the rare and threatened species, which was only described by scientists as recently as 2019. Spotted softshell turtles, Pelodiscus variegatus, were previously considered part of the genetically and morphologically variable Chinese softshell turtle (Pelodiscus sinensis), a widely distributed species ranging from eastern Russia through China and Korea to Vietnam. However, scientists now classify Chinese softshell turtles as a species complex comprising seven separate species, one of which is the spotted softshell turtle. Although the orange-and-black-speckled turtles were described as distinct in 2019, frustratingly little is known about them in order to inform conservation actions, according to Thomas Ziegler, coordinator of nature conservation projects for Vietnam and Laos at Cologne Zoological Garden in Germany. “It’s actually a race against time, to discover species before they disappear,” Ziegler, who was involved in the scientific description of the species, told Mongabay in an email. “The joy of the discovery quickly gave way to worry — does it still exist, or has it already been extirpated?” One of the captive-bred juvenile spotted softshell turtles (Pelodiscus variegatus) photographed upon its the release into the wild in northern Vietnam. Image courtesy of C. T. Pham and T. Ziegler. Following the first scientific description of the species, Ziegler and his colleagues from Germany…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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