A Discovery Upends What We Know About Hicatee Turtles… They May Travel in Herds

The scientists’ study, published this week in the journal Animal Behaviour, may help conservationists protect the critically endangered Central American river turtle—locally known as a hicatee, which has declined throughout its range of Belize, Mexico, and Guatemala. There are no solid population estimates of the heavily poached reptile, but their numbers could be as low as 10,000.

The hicatee were swimming around the river together, in some cases never straying three feet from a fellow animal. “It felt like I was tracking a pod of whales,” says McKnight, an ecologist at LaTrobe University in Australia and the Belize Turtle Ecology Lab.