We departed Fernandina as soon as all-aboard yesterday evening, for the long trip back to the central realm of the archipelago. Our destination: the southern side of Santa Cruz, second largest island in the group, nervecentre of both tourism and conservation in Galapagos and home to the largest human settlement here. Today we did something a little different, as we left our home away from home, the Polaris, for the whole day.
This fascinating island has huge amounts to offer. We spent the morning visiting the world-famous Charles Darwin Research Station, the institution responsible for research into how to manage the national park, with an important role as advisor to the Ecuadorian government. One of their oldest and most important projects is the recovery of the endangered giant tortoise populations. The various islands were once inhabited by 14 separate subspecies (some herpetologists today are inclined towards classification as separate species), yet unfortunately 3 of the Galapagos tortoise populations went the way of most of their remote cousins in the Indian Ocean: driven to extinction by the greed and necessity of man.
At the beginning of the 16th century, 3 distinct groups of giant tortoises survived in the world, containing over 6 species that belonged to the genus Geochelone. This genus not only contained the three sets of giants but a number of smaller tortoises native to the South American mainland, Africa, Madagascar and Southern Asia. The giant tortoises were found only on remote oceanic islands. As David Quammen so nicely put it: “Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation.” Thus giant tortoises seem like freaks of nature, but this kind of exaggerated trait is actually common in those strangest of worlds: the oceanic island. In fact tortoises reached giant proportions on islands in three unrelated occasions, a fact that escaped that great naturalist, Charles Darwin. When he first encountered the Galapagos tortoise, Darwin assumed it had been left on the islands by pirates or whalers on their way from the Indian Ocean.
These gentle giants were confined to the small isolated islands of Galapagos, the Mascarenes (Mauritius, Rodriguez, Reunion) and found scattered across 700 miles of oceanic wilderness, from the Seychelles to Aldabra. Once the isolation of these islands was breached by the great ocean-going ships, this vulnerable animal became an important source of food, stored by the hundreds in the hulls of ships due to their physiological dormancy, and fell victim to introduced species. The only wild tortoise populations that have survived to this day are an important population on Aldabra, which has made a huge comeback thanks to the creation of a special reserve, and our Galapagos tortoises, which are gradually being brought back from the brink of extinction by the CDRS.
Our day continued with a trip to the humid cloudforests of the highlands of Santa Cruz, and an afternoon spent observing the island’s endemic subspecies of giant tortoise go about its life in the wild: a reminder of a world long gone, before the great age of discovery, when much of the world lay beyond the reach of mankind.
This fascinating island has huge amounts to offer. We spent the morning visiting the world-famous Charles Darwin Research Station, the institution responsible for research into how to manage the national park, with an important role as advisor to the Ecuadorian government. One of their oldest and most important projects is the recovery of the endangered giant tortoise populations. The various islands were once inhabited by 14 separate subspecies (some herpetologists today are inclined towards classification as separate species), yet unfortunately 3 of the Galapagos tortoise populations went the way of most of their remote cousins in the Indian Ocean: driven to extinction by the greed and necessity of man.
At the beginning of the 16th century, 3 distinct groups of giant tortoises survived in the world, containing over 6 species that belonged to the genus Geochelone. This genus not only contained the three sets of giants but a number of smaller tortoises native to the South American mainland, Africa, Madagascar and Southern Asia. The giant tortoises were found only on remote oceanic islands. As David Quammen so nicely put it: “Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation.” Thus giant tortoises seem like freaks of nature, but this kind of exaggerated trait is actually common in those strangest of worlds: the oceanic island. In fact tortoises reached giant proportions on islands in three unrelated occasions, a fact that escaped that great naturalist, Charles Darwin. When he first encountered the Galapagos tortoise, Darwin assumed it had been left on the islands by pirates or whalers on their way from the Indian Ocean.
These gentle giants were confined to the small isolated islands of Galapagos, the Mascarenes (Mauritius, Rodriguez, Reunion) and found scattered across 700 miles of oceanic wilderness, from the Seychelles to Aldabra. Once the isolation of these islands was breached by the great ocean-going ships, this vulnerable animal became an important source of food, stored by the hundreds in the hulls of ships due to their physiological dormancy, and fell victim to introduced species. The only wild tortoise populations that have survived to this day are an important population on Aldabra, which has made a huge comeback thanks to the creation of a special reserve, and our Galapagos tortoises, which are gradually being brought back from the brink of extinction by the CDRS.
Our day continued with a trip to the humid cloudforests of the highlands of Santa Cruz, and an afternoon spent observing the island’s endemic subspecies of giant tortoise go about its life in the wild: a reminder of a world long gone, before the great age of discovery, when much of the world lay beyond the reach of mankind.
