Santa Cruz Island
Our expedition through the infamous “Enchanted Isles” continued with another full and exciting day that dawned clear and warm over the southern part of Santa Cruz Island: Academy Bay.
One amongst many highlights this particular island has to offer is the opportunity of seeing the namesake of the island group: the giant tortoises. Many of these enormous animals are shaped somewhat like saddles, which led the early Spanish explorers to name them “Galápagos” after a particular kind of saddle they had back home.
These creatures evolved from a medium-sized Chilean desert tortoise that got washed out to sea and swept to this remote outpost by the Humboldt Current – a valiant animal that probably survived days or weeks adrift under a tropical sun, no fresh water or food in sight, and in all probability carrying a load of eggs… Its colonisation of the archipelago seems nothing short of miraculous, yet it happened separately both in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, where giant tortoises arose in oceanic islands in a remarkable example of co-evolution.
In Galápagos they spread and evolved into a total of fourteen separate subspecies, three of which have since gone extinct but many of which are thriving as a testimony to eons past. On Santa Cruz, the population is of the “dome” morphotype, as the highlands of this island offer copious food at ground level. Only five of the Galápagos Islands are tall enough to intercept the low cloud that lies over the archipelago in the cold season, and these have dense highland pastures and cloud forests, with as many as seven different vegetation zones.
This was truly a day to remember, and that will stand out among many others on this wonderful trip.
Our expedition through the infamous “Enchanted Isles” continued with another full and exciting day that dawned clear and warm over the southern part of Santa Cruz Island: Academy Bay.
One amongst many highlights this particular island has to offer is the opportunity of seeing the namesake of the island group: the giant tortoises. Many of these enormous animals are shaped somewhat like saddles, which led the early Spanish explorers to name them “Galápagos” after a particular kind of saddle they had back home.
These creatures evolved from a medium-sized Chilean desert tortoise that got washed out to sea and swept to this remote outpost by the Humboldt Current – a valiant animal that probably survived days or weeks adrift under a tropical sun, no fresh water or food in sight, and in all probability carrying a load of eggs… Its colonisation of the archipelago seems nothing short of miraculous, yet it happened separately both in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, where giant tortoises arose in oceanic islands in a remarkable example of co-evolution.
In Galápagos they spread and evolved into a total of fourteen separate subspecies, three of which have since gone extinct but many of which are thriving as a testimony to eons past. On Santa Cruz, the population is of the “dome” morphotype, as the highlands of this island offer copious food at ground level. Only five of the Galápagos Islands are tall enough to intercept the low cloud that lies over the archipelago in the cold season, and these have dense highland pastures and cloud forests, with as many as seven different vegetation zones.
This was truly a day to remember, and that will stand out among many others on this wonderful trip.