Wild Inside: Turtle births mark a rare first for Zoo Knoxville

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WVLT) - It’s a first for Zoo Knoxville and a first for any member of the Association of Zoos & Aquariums.

Two baby Malayan flat-shelled turtles now call Zoo Knoxville home. Steven Nelson watches over the turtles at the Zoo’s Clayton Family Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Campus.

“So few of these guys have been bred, we’re actually the first AZA facility to have ever bred them, and now we have two of them,” said Nelson.

The turtles are born with a lime-colored shell and sometimes resemble a little leaf.

“This is a species that we’ve had here for 13 years and it’s taken that long to breed them.,” Nelson said.

Nelson added that the success can be attributed to the ARC campus, which opened its doors in 2020.

“Having conditions like the greenhouse, where the adults live, allowing them more light exposure, more warm temperatures, it just took a while to find out what these guys wanted in order to breed,” Nelson said.

You can see the adult turtles in the ARC greenhouse habitat, the babies are being kept in a safe room while they continue to grow.

To learn more about these new baby turtles, watch Wild Inside! in the video above, or click here to get tickets for yourself to check them out at Zoo Knoxville.