Giant Tortoises Now Outnumber People in Seychelles
Giant tortoises are making a big comeback on a remote Indian Ocean atoll. A new survey estimates that about 180,000 Aldabra giant tortoises live on Aldabra Atoll in the Seychelles, the highest number ever recorded for the species, CNN reported on October 8, 2026.
That is more tortoises than people in the whole country, which has a human population of around 122,000. It is a striking turnaround. In the 1800s, heavy exploitation cut the island's tortoise population to fewer than 1,000. A recovery program helped make the atoll a strict nature reserve in 1981, and it became a UNESCO World Heritage site a year later. Today it is one of only two places on Earth where giant tortoises live in the wild.
The Seychelles Islands Foundation (SIF) and the University of Exeter in the UK led the survey, which drew on five years of counts from 2018 to 2022. It is the first update since an estimate of 100,000 tortoises in the late 1990s. Co-author Nancy Bunbury said dense plants make counting hard, but the team now has a reliable baseline to track the population for decades. The study appears in the journal Ecology and Evolution, Gulf News reported.
SIF chief executive Frauke Fleischer-Dogley called the result proof of what long-term conservation can achieve. The researchers still urge care, since longer droughts could cut shade and food, and rising seas threaten the low-lying atoll.
Slow and steady, it turns out, really can win.
