The four animals ranged in size from 11 to 12cm and weighed between five and nine grams, meaning they were likely less than a year old.
Council parks and recreation manager Caroline Rain said the enclosure had been thoroughly searched prior to the tuatara being moved in February 2023, meaning the babies had likely been in egg-form at the time.
“We did everything you’d expect us to have done to ensure that there wasn’t anything there,” she said. “They were genuinely just missed, they were not seen.”
For a moment there I was thinking maybe people in Invercargill always have to check potential demo sites for tuatara before they proceed!
Me reading headline “omg there are a lot more tuatara down that way than I realized”
I had the same first impression! But unfortunately if you check the distribution map on the side of the wikipedia page, they basically only live on islands.
There’s also this snippet:
During routine maintenance work at Zealandia in late 2008, a tuatara nest was uncovered,[21] with a hatchling found the following autumn.[22] This is thought to be the first case of tuatara successfully breeding in the wild on New Zealand’s North Island in over 200 years.[21]
Since Zealandia is a fenced reserve (that has a specific tuatara enclosure within that reserve), it seems they are not very common on the mainland at all.
To elaborate however, although Zealandia has a fenced “scientific” enclosure for Tuatara near the front, there’s a separate group of them running wild around the rest of the sanctuary (though still inside the main fence). There’s a particular track up near the back of the fence with artificial burrows where they’re encouraged to hang out. You can often encounter them in the tracks near there, but it’s also completely possible to meet them effectively living wild anywhere else within the fence, and also not entirely uncommon.
But yeah they basically don’t live on the mainland outside fenced sanctuaries at all any more. Rats interfered too much that they were effectively gone from the mainland from some time after Maori arrival.
Ah I didn’t realise they were all through! I haven’t spent a lot of time there, we’ll probably go more when the kids are older.
