180,000 giant tortoises on Seychelles island!

Saw this very cool Guardian article on Facebook, and had to dig in!

It's based on this University of Exeter research paper: Inferring the Abundance of an Island Megaherbivore From Semi-Structured Distance Sampling

(Got to love that title!)

The research design (summarised in Credo tldr) sounds really interesting. Would be cool to see some kind of video documentary of how the researchers went about it.

The Guardian article says at one point, there were only ~1,000 giant tortoises on the island (due to poaching etc.). So getting to 180,000 sounds fantastic. The research paper does say prior counting methods are probably underestimates, but nonetheless the difference must be huge.

Overall a very uplifting (and true!) story to read on social media.