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