How wonderful it is, after an absence of over two months, to be back in this wonderfully strange and unique little corner of the world. Having said that, it is precisely the unusual nature of all inhabitants of this archipelago that make it absolutely normal, as we are after all talking about islands, where strangeness is the norm! Being small areas that are completely isolated, with difficulties of arrival and establishment, the usual rules of evolution do not apply, and you end up seeing extreme creatures. Where else but an island would you see flightless birds, sea-going lizards and giant reptiles, the size of a small car?

These are some of the features that characterize a remote archipelago like our own, but one of the most important is that which can be called "ecological naïveté". In isolated places such as the Galapagos, there is what is known as a disharmonic distribution, where certain faunal groups are over -represented, and others virtually absent. One of the more conspicuous groups missing here are the large mammalian predators, so many species have genetically been bred out of their fear instinct, over the aeons.

This phenomenon can be observed wherever we go, even to the edges of the sea, where a renowned and feared predator such as the shark will swirl around one's ankles in the dozens, in a totally harmless fashion. One of our naturalists, Cecibel, actually counted over fifty of these animals in the shallows today, a record by even Galapagos standards!