The gopher tortoise, Gopherus polyphemus, is a grayish-brown tortoise whose adults are 8 to 15 inches long and can weigh up to 30 pounds, though average 8 to 10 pounds, while juveniles are yellowish brown. Its front legs and feet are flat and shovel-like for digging burrows, its back legs and feet are elephantine, and it has no webbing between its toes. It lives in dry upland habitat with sandy, well-drained soils, an open tree canopy that lets sunlight reach the ground, and low-growing food plants for its herbivorous diet, including gopher apple and purple love grass. Mating season runs from April through July, females mature between 10 and 20 years old, and they lay clutches of 4 to 7 ping-pong-ball-sized eggs buried in the ground, with a gestation of 80 to 100 days and sex determined by soil temperature, as eggs above 85 degrees Fahrenheit develop into females. Hatchlings are 1 to 2 inches long and grow three-quarters of an inch a year. As a keystone species, the gopher tortoise's burrows provide home and refuge to more than 350 vertebrate and invertebrate species, which may share active burrows or use abandoned ones. These burrows help regulate body temperature and provide shelter from predators and wildfires; they can reach up to 50 feet long and 15 feet deep depending on the water table, are about as wide as the tortoise is long, and have an apron or mound at the entrance that is often used as a nesting site. Individual tortoises may use multiple burrows. Gopher tortoises can live more than 89 years, right themselves if flipped over, socialize in groups called pods, eat bones from dead animals presumably to get calcium, dig up to 9 feet a day in sandy soils, and have a good sense of smell. They are a protected species, but their populations are declining because of habitat loss and fragmentation, disease, vehicle strikes, and predation by invasive species.