Inadvertently, they had protected the tortoises as well. Elsewhere, however, human demands have superseded the needs of the tortoise, threatening its existence. I hope that as more people become acquainted with these gentle creatures they will strive to find ways to share the habitat with its original occupants. A tortoise is a turtle, but not all turtles are tortoises. No, that's not a riddle.
Many people think of a tortoise as any turtle that lives on land.
In most cases, they'd be right. The box turtle, however, is more closely related to freshwater turtles than to tortoises. There are only about 50 species of tortoises worldwide. Four of these dwell in the United States and Mexico, but the gopher tortoise alone has ventured east of the Mississippi River. Gopher tortoises occupy the coastal plain of Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, and they barely make it into Louisiana and South Carolina.