Anyone who’s seen a cane turtle will agree it’s extremely shy. You’d think it was a celebrity weary of too much attention. But few people know of it, and fewer seek it. Studying such a creature in the wild requires patience, an attribute Deepak Veerappan has in spades.
When he began his research in the evergreen forests of Anamalai, Tamil Nadu, he went out every morning and evening, rain or shine, without spotting a turtle for months. How was he to collect data when the subject was elusive? The lack of success could have been dispiriting but the researcher didn’t let it affect him.
The 10-cm-long turtle blended in colour and shape with the dry leaves that clothed the forest floor. Veerappan finally found one after six months, and he couldn’t stop talking about it. Once his eyes became attuned to the creatures, he spotted 12 in two hours. He glued radio transmitters to their shells, and let them lead him to more turtles. They had some way of finding each other in the immense vastness of the rainforest.
The species’ quirky habits make the job of a researcher desperate to find it much harder. It doesn’t like just any forest of the Western Ghats. Several turtles live together in some areas but not in others.
Wrong place, wrong time
Not only was looking for the creature in the wrong place futile, so was searching for it at the wrong time. Rainforests don’t undergo a distinct winter season, but the turtle puts its life on hold for six months after the Northeast monsoon recedes. Veerappan’s datasheet of this period reads: ‘eyes open’, ‘eyes closed’, ‘head retracted’, ‘head out’. He and his field assistants checked on his research animals twice a day, and the turtles really didn’t move.
The cane turtle is an anomaly. It scuttles through the forest, but it is not a tortoise. Although the shape of its legs and webbed feet are reminiscent of its aquatic relatives, it doesn’t like water and stays clear of streams. When scared, it dives under dry leaves as if it were plunging into a pond or brook. Why it adopted a land-based lifestyle no one yet knows. Perhaps the high rainfall was enough and the cool temperatures near water were more than it could endure.
To observe its behaviour requires subterfuge. “If it gets the feeling of being watched, it quietly disappears among the leaves,” Veerappan says. He pretended to be preoccupied with something else while casting sidelong glances at the creature as it sniffed its way to fallen fruits, millipedes, and snails.
Colourful transformation
During the breeding season, the males transformed. Their heads blossomed with patches of bright red, yellow, pink, and black as if a child had gone to work on them. Even these colourful pigments blended with flowers, fungi, and dry leaves, and were of no help in finding the reptiles.
No longer bashful, the flamboyant males went for each other. If one didn’t retreat, they squared off for a vicious match, biting chunks out of each other’s carapaces as if they were no more than crispy chips. They didn’t have sharp teeth, but the bony edges of their hooked mouths were knife-like. Broken bits of shell above their heads spoke of past battles. The ability to tuck into their body armour and out of injury’s way protected their heads.
Despite the cane turtle’s elaborate efforts to hide from humans, it has little meat to be worth their interest. Few people bother going through the trouble of gathering them for a meal. When picked up, its first line of defence is not to bite but to defecate. The second is to spray a pungent liquid from a gland in its rear end.
After drawing out some of the secrets of these enigmatic creatures, Veerappan couldn’t raise grants to continue studying them. Even funding agencies appear to have given in to the cane turtle’s love of anonymity.
The writer is not a conservationista but many creatures share her home for reasons she is yet to discover.
