From the National Geographic Islander in Galápagos, 3/23/2011, National Geographic Islander

Santa Cruz Island

Galápagos mean tortoises, and today was a day dedicated to seeing them in captivity and in the wild as well. Puerto Ayora is the largest town in the archipelago, and it is also the home of the Galápagos National Park service and the Charles Darwin Station.

This two institution have been working together for almost 40 years with great success. When they began the breeding program the number of Galápagos tortoises was as low as 5,000. We will probably never know for certain how many there were before humans impacted their population, but scientists have postulated the astronomic amount of almost a quarter of million. Thanks to these two institutions, the population is recovering in an exponential way. At some point they will stop this program and probably start a new one, with the main goal of restoring every single island.

This morning we saw two emblematic tortoises from Galápagos, each one with a different story. Without a doubt one of the most famous is Lonesome George. He was found in 1971 and since then we have been trying to save his race, as he is the last of his kind, but unfortunately we have not been meet with success. This male tortoise was living with two females from Wolf volcano, because they were thought to be the closest related to him, but scientists have discovered that the closest are actually the tortoises from Española Island. Now he is living with two females from this island as part of the project to save Pinta Island tortoises, where he came from almost forty years ago.

We also had the opportunity to meet the second most famous among all, “Super Diego.” This male tortoise was probably collected from Española Island by the San Diego Zoo in the 1900s, but in 1977 he returned to Galápagos and was kept with the 12 remaining female tortoises from Española Island, and thanks to his fertility nowadays we have over 2,000 tortoises roaming in the wild. Sixty percent of the tortoises now living in Española are related to this male, and that is the reason he got the nickname as ‘SUPER DIEGO’.