David Brill
The Galapagos Islands are treasured by naturalists the world over for their unrivalled diversity of wildlife and geology. David Brill visits the islands, and reports on the difficult challenges they face.
February 12th saw the world celebrate the life of one of its great scientific heroes. Two hundred years on from the birth of Charles Darwin, and 150 from the publication of his much-celebrated On the Origin of the Species, his theories of natural selection continue to this day to shape our understanding of the world around us and our appreciation of the history of mankind.
The Galapagos Islands, located around 1,000 km to the west of mainland Ecuador, played an integral role in the development of Darwin’s theories. He visited the archipelago in 1835 aboard the HMS Beagle, on its way back to England from a 3-year voyage around the coastlines of South America. An enthusiastic naturalist with a seemingly limitless capacity for taking notes and collecting specimens, it was here that he acquired the data which were to famously mould his thinking on evolution. The different sub-species of finch, each one perfectly adapted to its niche on the respective islands, has become perhaps the best-cited example of his inspiration.
To visit the Galapagos Islands today is to grapple with a difficult ethical dilemma. The national park authorities depend on the income from tourism to enact the conservation projects that seek to preserve the islands’ unique ecosystems, yet it is the influx of tourists which hastens their very demise. The annual number of visitors rose from 68,856 in 2000 to 108,436 in 2004 – pairing a substantial rise in income with an equivalent threat from pollution and the introduction of non-native species. Andrew Marr, president of the Galapagos Conservation Trust (GCT), warned recently that development needs to be brought under control, and suggested that tourists be restricted to one visit per lifetime. Marr himself, a well known British journalist and commentator, has pledged never to return despite falling in love with the islands on a visit in 2002 and taking up the GCT presidency in 2006.
For those who do exercise their right to make this literal once-in-a-lifetime trip, it is easy to see why Marr feels so strongly about the preservation of the Galapagos Islands. The beauty and diversity are every bit as spectacular as promised, and can scarcely be captured in words or photographs. There can be few spots in the world where you can watch a mother hawk teaching her young to swoop for marine iguanas, which scurry for cover in the cracks of a scarred volcanic landscape. With sea lions sunbathing on bright white sand to your left, albatrosses circling a haunted-looking scrub of a forest to your right, and giant turtles peeking their heads out from the shining blue ocean ahead of you, the list of possible locations is surely shortened to one.
The Galapagos Islands sit on a tectonic conveyor belt above a submarine volcanic hotspot. As new cone-shaped islands rise up from the seabed, they begin to move slowly away from the lava source, becoming cool and inactive as they are carried east and eventually worn down by erosion. At a pace of 75 mm per year this is a slow process: Espaňola, the oldest of the 13 main islands, is estimated to be around 4 million years old while Fernandina is the youngest at under a million years and remains volcanically active to this day.
It is this diversity of geology that has given rise to the islands’ astonishing range of wildlife, fostering the evolution of several species which do not exist anywhere else in the world. While Fernandina sits barren and lifeless, its red rocks resembling a Martian landscape, Espaňola is green and verdant and contains many of the natives endemic to the Galapagos. In the middle sits Santa Cruz, the second largest of the islands and home to Puerto Ayora, the major population center of the islands. Santa Cruz is also the residence of Lonesome George – the world’s last surviving giant Pinta tortoise and the most famous citizen of the Galapagos (pictured). Despite countless attempts to encourage him to bear offspring he continues to live out his days as a bachelor at the Charles Darwin Research Station, apparently oblivious to the demise of his species and the iconic status he has gained among environmentalists.
There are signs that tourism in the Galapagos Islands is slowing in the current economic climate. Some of the cruise liners have received unusually high numbers of cancellations and are down-scaling their itineraries for this year. It remains to be seen how the islands will cope with this drop in the income which has become such a double-edged lifeline, and whether the unique beauty of the Galapagos will benefit or suffer from this downturn. As long as tourism can be appropriately managed and regulated, however, there is little doubt that the Galapagos Islands will remain one of the world’s greatest destinations – as inspiring to travelers today as they were to Darwin himself.
No comments:
Post a Comment