In fact, the tortoise is quite the social butterfly, scientists at the Tall Timbers Research Station near Tallahassee have learned. To preserve the vanishing gopher tortoises, biologists need to know more about how they behave. Piecing together the sometimes blurry pictures as if assembling a children's flip book, the scientists saw the two gophers circle each other warily. Then one ventured into the burrow while the other sidled out. Then they were both outside.
Gophers fight by trying to tip each other over, like slow-motion sumo wrestling.
These two were clearly jockeying for position. The answer turned out to be the latter. Although other researchers had previously found anecdotal evidence of the gophers' social behavior, the pictures shot by Tall Timbers and another such project at Auburn University paint a far more detailed portrait of what their lives are like. Both projects are helping biologists figure out how tortoises get along with each other at a time when there are considerably fewer gophers than there used to be. Development and disease have been blamed for their decline.