Giant Turtle

The giant turtle is actually a species of fresh water turtle that is called Cantor's giant soft shelled turtle. This is a rare and elusive creature that gets its name, obviously, from its large size. The giant turtle can grow to be six feet long and can easily weigh more than one hundred pounds.

The giant turtle has small eyes, a broad head and its upper shell is olive colored and smooth. The young giant turtles might have heads that are dark-spotted and might feature some yellow around their upper shells. It is a primarily carnivorous creature that has been given an ambush predator status. It eats fish, mollusks and crustaceans and some aquatic plants. One of the reasons the giant turtle is so elusive is because it spends almost all of its life (ninety five percent of it) motionless and buried. It only leaves its eyes and mouth outside of the sand. It will surface once during the day to take a breath (as all turtles breathe air) and in February or March will lay between twenty to twenty eight eggs on river banks.

The Giant turtle is known for having a frog-like face and a blank stare. Their upper shells are smooth and flat. While most turtles have distinguishable shells, the giant turtle is a soft shelled turtle so it has a smooth shell that blends in perfectly with muddy river bottoms. These turtles can live to be a hundred years old. One of the reasons it lives so long is that it spends the majority of its life motionless. When it does move, however, it moves with incredible speed, unlike the slowness that is characteristic of other turtles. When it spots its prey it will shoot its neck out, at roughly the same speed as a cobra strike and in much the same manner that a chameleon will shoot it tongue. Its bite is the hardest of any animal on the planet.

While the giant turtle was once found all throughout Eastern Asia, it is now very endangered and has disappeared from many of the places it used to be seen. It used to be found in Thailand, Indonesia, India, Burma, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Malaysia, China, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Borneo, western Java and Sumatra. Now the most concentrated population is found in the Mekong River in Cambodia. Before the 2007 study that found them in the Mekong River, the last sighting of the giant turtle took place in 2003.

Some people confuse the Cantor giant turtle with the Asian giant turtle. The Asian giant turtle is also a freshwater turtle that is found in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Australia. It, too, is very large, but is not quite as large as the Cantor.

The turtles are so endangered that many scientists have taken to breeding them in captivity and then releasing the young turtles into the wild. One such researcher raised twelve giant turtle eggs in captivity and then, after they hatched kept them for two weeks before releasing them into the Mekong River, their primary habitat.