Site fidelity. — The successful homing of 61.54% of the
translocated Pancake tortoises attests to high site fidelity of the
species. Group-level scan sampling, ad libitum sampling and camera
trapping further proved that the species exhibits great site fidelity
with the tortoises noted to spent over 98% of their time inside their
home crevices. Whenever they came out of their crevices, usually during
the rainy season, the tortoise spent an average of 34.30±2.52 minutes
(n=71 events) feeding and/or mating and always returned to the very
crevices. Occasional dry season crevice exit also happened but this was
usually by a single tortoise that came out to feed before quickly
returning to the home crevice.
Analysis of the Pancake tortoise crevice occupancy by Mann-Kendall test
for monotonic trend showed a statistically significant decreasing trend
for seven stations (1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9 and 10) at P<0.001 while
for the remaining five stations (5, 6, 8, 9, 11, and 12), there was no
statistically significant trend, P>0.05 (Table 2).
Table 2: Analysis of crevice occupancy data by Mann-Kendall test for
monotonic trend