Tortoise whose active sex drive helped save his species clocks out

The Española Giant Tortoise was once considered beyond saving. After decades in decline, just over a dozen were left on the Galapagos island by the 1970s, most of them female. Their numbers were so sparse that some likely had gone decades without encountering another tortoise. Extinction seemed inevitable.

Then Diego came along. Flown in from the San Diego Zoo in 1976, the extremely sexually active tortoise went on to father upwards of 800 offspring. His considerable effort helped his species, known scientifically as Chelonoidis hoodensis, rebound to a population of 2,000. It also turned him into a star, his sexual prowess the subject of articles in newspapers across the globe.

Now, the ancient tortoise is headed for retirement. Officials with the Galápagos National Park service announced Friday their breeding program has been so successful that it is being terminated. Diego, who’s believed to be more than a hundred years old, will be released from captivity and returned to the wild.

Not that it’ll slow his storied sex drive.

“He might actually amp it up,” said James Gibbs, a professor of environmental and forest biology at the State University of New York in Syracuse.

Little is known about Diego’s early life. The long necked, yellowfaced tortoise is thought to have been picked up in Española during a scientific expedition sometime between 1900 and 1959. At some point, he landed at the zoo. When scientists discovered that Chelonoidis hoodensis was its own species, and that Diego was one of the few still in existence, he was brought back to the Galapagos for the breeding effort.