Overview
Tuatara, like all ‘cold-blooded’ creatures, depend on the outside temperature for their body temperature. The warmer the temperature, the greater the activity level. One of the tuatara’s unusual features, for a reptile, is its tolerance for cool temperatures. And its nocturnal behaviour means it is active during the coolest times of the day. Even at a chilly 6°C, you can see hardy tuatara taking the air outside their burrows, though moving pretty sluggishly.
This adaptation to cool living means that many things happen very slowly in the tuatara world. They take almost as long as humans to become sexually mature. They keep growing for up to thirty years. They certainly live up to sixty years, and they may live for a hundred or more. Nobody really knows – nobody has studied an individual tuatara that long!
During winter, they don’t actually hibernate, but they may not eat for up to six months, and their breathing rate can slow to about one breath in an hour. Females get pregnant about once every four years – that’s how long it takes for their eggs to develop. The eggs take another year or so to hatch.
Activity levels rise in warm temperatures, but tuatara have no tolerance for very hot weather – they expire in temperatures much above 30°C. And the prospect of food can reveal a surprising turn of speed in a hungry tuatara.
Text originally published in Tai Awatea, Te Papa's onfloor multimedia database.