I recently visited the Galapagos for the first time, on a tour with the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum and Knowmad Adventures. The Galapagos Islands, whose animals and plants played a crucial role in Charles Darwin formulating his ideas of evolutionary change, is Must See location for biologists...so, contrarily, I scorned it for 50-odd years. But, eventually my curiousity sent me there.
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| Galapagos |
This tour was four days, so we really saw only a corner of the archipelago. To imitate Darwin and visit most of the islands, you need about two weeks. On the four islands I saw, I saw some of the most iconic species. However, the comparisons that perplexed Darwin were not obvious. I only saw one species of giant tortoise and one species of Darwin's finch (Geospiza). These animals, on islands within sight of each other, form obviously different species. Today this is readily explained, but for Darwin, it created a puzzle he spent years solving.
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| marine iguana, Amblyrhynchus cristatus, only found in the Galapagos and the only marine reptile in the world |
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| Galapagos land iguana, Conolophus subcristatus male turning gold for mating season |
Darwin and I go way back. I read Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle in graduate school (1970s). I loved it. I was put off by the image of the mature Darwin: an old man with a huge beard, a painstaking writer making his points in On the Origin of Species very slowly. But when he sailed on The Beagle, a British ship mapping the coasts of South America, he was 22, fresh out of college, and clueless about what he wanted to do with his life. The Voyage of the Beagle, based on his journals and published in 1839 shortly after his return, has biological descriptions that can be more than you want to know about barnacles, but it is also a delight as a look at South America in 1831-1835. Darwin was horrified by slave markets in Brazil, had a difficult but exhilarating time climbing through tangled forests in Tierra del Fuego, saw a ship high on the beach after a tsunami in Chile, and much more. The book is out of copyright so you can read it online link. That Darwin I liked very much.
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| Galapagos tortoise (Chelonoidis niger), Darwin's finch (Geospiza species) |
The Galapagos is beautiful. Ocean and coastline, beaches and scrubby shore vegetation that gives way to trees on higher islands.
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The animals and plants were wonderful mix: we saw were some widespread Pacific species, like sea lions, frigate birds, and purslane, and then we'd see endemic-to-the-Galapagos organisms like the marine iguanas, nocturnal gulls, and Galapagos cotton. I'll stick to animals in this post, to give Galapagos plants a whole blog of their own.
The Galapagos is a volcanic cluster of islands, growing slowly westward. The islands are very dry, with a rainy season from January to May and then no rain the rest of the year. Close to the Equator, the temperatures at sea level sit in the middle 80s (F), day after day. The ocean, though, is cool for the Equator, about 75 F, which is part of why it rarely gets hotter than the 80s. In late April, the vegetation at sea level was green, but it did not rain on us. |
| Shore, Galapagos |
Darwin wrote that the sun on the lava rock of the Galapagos made it so hot that it was too hot even through his heaviest boots. I didn't experience that, but it was frequently quite hot, hotter than the air temperature indicated, probably due to heat reflecting off the dark rocks and old lava.
The whole archipelago is a national park and carefully guarded. We couldn't collect anything, even sand, and were expected to stay 6' from the animals. Protected, the animals let us approach, so even I got outstanding animal photos.
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| frigate bird (Fregata magnificens) on her nest |
We slept on a ship, going out for hikes early and late to avoid the heat of the day. The ship moved us around between islands very easily and provided comfortable living conditions in a rather uncomfortable climate. I'm a terrestrial biologist, so I enjoyed swimming and looking at fish, but took no successful photos and identified only the most obvious creatures (hammerhead shark...from a distance. Very cool).
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| Some places you could approach rookeries, with diverse nesting birds |
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| Tiny islands, cool fish underwater |
Next week: Galapagos plants
Comments and corrections welcome.
References
Pearson D. L. and L. Beletsky. 2005. Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands. Travelers' Wildlife Guides. Interline Press, Northhampton, Massachusetts.
Google search, for details of animal species and to check Galapagos facts.
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