Reproduction
Breeding occurs in the spring, and females lay two to 9 elliptical, hard-shelled eggs in a shallow burrow or under shoreline debris. An unusual behaviour is the tendency to share nesting sites; in one case there were 16 nests under a single log. The eggs hatch in late summer or early fall. Egg predation is a major cause of mortality, as with many turtle species. In one Pennsylvania population, hatching success was only 15 percent, and predators alone destoyed 25 of 32 nests. Hatchlings are usually less than one inch long. Their lifespan, as with most turtles, is quite long, with specimens in captivity being recorded at 50+ years of age.
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Famous quotes containing the word reproduction:
“The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“An original is a creation
motivated by desire.
Any reproduction of an original
is motivated by necessity ...
It is marvelous that we are
the only species that creates
gratuitous forms.
To create is divine, to reproduce
is human.”
—Man Ray (1890–1976)
“Although Samuel had a depraved imagination—perhaps even because of this—love, for him, was less a matter of the senses than of the intellect. It was, above all, admiration and appetite for beauty; he considered reproduction a flaw of love, and pregnancy a form of insanity. He wrote on one occasion: “Angels are hermaphrodite and sterile.””
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)