Ten captive-bred Asian Giant Tortoises (Manouria emys), one of the largest tortoise species in mainland Asia, were recently released into which National Park of India?

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Correct — A, Ntangki National Park. On 19 December 2022 ten captive-bred juvenile Asian giant tortoises (Manouria emys) were soft-released inside Ntangki — also spelt Intanki — National Park in Peren district, Nagaland, in a joint operation by the Nagaland Forest Department, the Turtle Survival Alliance and Wildlife Conservation Society India. The animals were hatched in 2018 and reared for five years at the Nagaland Zoological Park, Dimapur, and weighed about 2.4 kg each at release; that zoo holds 110 hatchlings and juveniles bred from 13 adults, the largest captive holding of the species anywhere. 'Soft release' is the operative term: the juveniles were first moved into a large fenced enclosure of native habitat to acclimatise through the winter, to be allowed to disperse into the surrounding forest at the onset of the monsoon under active tracking by a joint project team, so that they develop site fidelity instead of wandering out of the protected area. The choice of park was not arbitrary. The subspecies that occurs in India, Manouria emys phayrei, ranges only from north-western Thailand across Myanmar to north-eastern India, so a rewilding release had to be made inside that natural range — and Ntangki, notified as a reserved forest in 1923, upgraded to a wildlife sanctuary of about 202 sq km in April 1975 and declared a national park in March 1993, sits in exactly the moist forest belt the tortoise needs. The species is listed Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List, driven there mainly by over-exploitation for consumption; Nagaland's chief wildlife warden described this as a pilot release, the first step in repopulating the species in stages, with the project designed to generate the first baseline data for a long-term regional release strategy.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Periyar lies in the Cardamom Hills of Idukki district, Kerala, on the other side of the subcontinent from this tortoise's range, and it is famous for a completely different set of animals — the elephant herds around Periyar lake, the tiger reserve declared in 1978, the Nilgiri tahr and the lion-tailed macaque. Manouria emys has never occurred in the Western Ghats. Periyar is a plausible-looking guess only because it is the Indian national park most students can name for wildlife tourism.  (c) Pench straddles Seoni and Chhindwara districts of Madhya Pradesh and continues into Maharashtra, in the dry-to-moist deciduous forests of the Satpura landscape that gave Kipling the setting for The Jungle Book. Central India does have a native tortoise — the Indian star tortoise, Geochelone elegans — and that association is what makes Pench tempting. But the star tortoise and the Asian giant tortoise are different animals with non-overlapping ranges, and no Manouria population exists in central India.  (d) Khangchendzonga in Sikkim is the strongest-sounding north-eastern distractor, since it is in the same broad region and became India's first Mixed UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016. It fails on altitude, not geography: the park climbs from roughly 1,200 m to the 8,586 m summit of Kanchenjunga, a high-Himalayan and alpine landscape of snow leopard and blue sheep. A lowland moist-forest tortoise cannot be rewilded there.

Concept: The Asian giant tortoise, Manouria emys, is the largest tortoise in mainland Asia; adults of the northern subspecies can reach about 25 kg in the wild. It is also, on molecular and morphological evidence, among the most primitive living tortoises — the genus Manouria is basal to the rest of the family Testudinidae — and it behaves unlike any other tortoise in one striking way: it is the only tortoise that lays its eggs above ground, the female raking leaf litter into a mound nest with her front and hind legs, laying up to 50 eggs inside it, then sitting on and near the nest and driving intruders off. It is largely herbivorous, feeding on fungi, shoots, ferns and especially Alocasia leaves in damp evergreen forest. Two subspecies are recognised: M. e. emys of southern Thailand, Malaysia, Sumatra and Borneo, and M. e. phayrei from north-western Thailand to north-eastern India. The species is recorded from Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, and the IUCN Red List assessment of 2019 places it in the Critically Endangered category.

State PCS 2023 Q47 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q47 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer