Santa Cruz Island & Chinese Hat
This is our fifth day already and the several islands we discovered began to reveal a natural clockwork process. It might not be obvious at the first sight, and classifying our pictures will definitely help to notice the evidence: animals don’t look the same from one island to another.
Let’s check our pictures of lizards, for example. Let’s put together our Espanola, Floreana, Fernandina and Santa Cruz lava lizard pictures. There’s no need to count their scales to see the differences.
Now let’s bend over our Mockingbird shots. Here again, Espanola, Champion Islet (off Floreana’s coast) and Santa Cruz populations present some clear differences. Well! Let’s achieve the complete job and put a new order into our pictures!
Marine iguanas, boobies, sea lion and prickly pear cacti shall be classified. Don’t we have something interesting here?! Sea lions are all alike; nothing looks more like a booby than another booby. But let’s have a closer look at our cacti… From shrub to tree size, from short or long to soft or scarce spines, every island has its own variety. Yes, variation appears in what started as our vacation pictures and became our Naturalist collection. Observation took us in Charles Darwin’s footstep and the treasure that lies in these islands was revealed.
Animals not only differ from their relatives on the mainland, they also were modified through isolation within the islands. Environmental changes that lay throughout the archipelago combine with an extreme and unpredictable climate to construct adaptation among the living organisms. Natural selection is the mechanism for evolution and what we can see around us today is a snapshot of this ongoing process of life.
During our afternoon navigation, a large pod of bottlenose dolphins came to the bow of the National Geographic Endeavour as if to celebrate an old fellowship. Later in the afternoon, a humpback whale and its calf breached n’ twisted as if to worship the joy of life. What a harmony and beauty these encounters tell. Tonight, smiles are on every face, unspoken comments in every smile.
“The grandeur of this view of life”… Darwin’s heritage reminds us that we share this planet with some equal forms of life that we shall love and respect.
