Traumatised by all that footage of baby turtles being eaten by predators? You’ll be delighted to learn that some turtle mums do help the hatchlings

(Image: Andrew Alvarez/Getty)

EMPEROR penguins endure months of subzero temperatures without eating, all to incubate their eggs. Wolf spiders carry their offspring – hundreds of them – around after they hatch. Poison dart frogs carry each of their tadpoles to its own little pond and return to feed it every few days.

Octopuses go even further, making the ultimate sacrifice for their offspring. After females lay their eggs, they spend the next month or two looking after them, cleaning them and fending off predators. By the time the eggs hatch, the mothers are so exhausted that they usually die or succumb to predators.

Not all parents in the animal world are so devoted. Among reptiles, especially, “lay and go away” is the norm. But have we been misjudging these animals? Out of South America have come the first hints that some turtles look after their young.

Canoe quietly along an Amazonian river at low water, and on rocks and logs you might see the smooth dark-grey shells of basking arrau river turtles (Podocnemis expansa), also known as giant Amazon river turtles. In favoured spots, where space is tight, they stack themselves like plates on a drying rack, forming a slanted series of shelly sun-worshippers. As one of their names suggests, they are the largest turtles in the Amazon. The shells of females can be nearly a metre long, and individuals can weigh up to 45 kilograms.

Female arrau turtles lay eggs during the dry season, when the low water exposes banks of sand for a few months. The turtles were once so numerous that Victorian naturalist Henry Walter Bates estimated that …