The importance we place on anniversaries can give them a transformative role, turning them into catalytic instants that can set us trundling along a genuinely novel path to the future. In the case of the Galápagos, Darwin-based anniversaries have played a major role in shaping the modern identity of the islands. As one historian has written, ‘The Galapagos did not make Darwin; if anything, Darwin, through his superior abilities as a thinker and theoretician, made the Galapagos; and, in doing so, he elevated these islands to the legendary status they have today.’
The first Darwin anniversary of any note was in 1909 and marked what would have been the naturalist’s one hundredth birthday (he’d died in 1882 at the age of seventy-three) and the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. In comparison to Darwin-based celebrations that were to come, this was a fairly low-key, quintessentially English affair; yet it was important for splicing Darwin and the Galápagos together in the popular consciousness.
The American naturalist William Beebe helped to cement this link in the 1920s with his immensely popular Galápagos: World’s End. For historian Edward J. Larson, Beebe’s published accounts of his 1923 expedition to the Galápagos ‘espoused evolutionism of a near religious variety’. In Beebe’s view, Darwin’s account of the Galápagos had not been equalled for its ‘general grasp and sheer interest’. With his beautiful writing style and knack for storytelling, Beebe pulled off something similar for the twentieth century, but his stunning descriptions of the Galápagos wilderness were also responsible for attracting a bunch of peculiar characters to the islands. Most infamous amongst these new arrivals were a German doctor with Nietzschean romantic leanings, his submissive patient-cum-lover and a sex-mad, self-styled ‘baroness’. Within five years, the baroness had mysteriously vanished (was she murdered?), and the doctor was dead (was it food poisoning or something more sinister?).
The following year, 1935, offered a chance to draw a line beneath this intrigue and reaffirm the association between Darwin and the Galápagos: it was exactly one hundred years since the arrival of HMS Beagle. American travel writer Victor Von Hagen went to the Galápagos to mark the occasion. In the hold of his schooner, he carried a replica of the Darwin bust then on show at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The plan was to erect it at the site of Darwin’s first Galápagos footfall on San Cristóbal. As Von Hagen wrote, ‘Raising the monument was more than an act of biological piety. It was the beginning of a campaign to bring to the attention of naturalists all over the world, and to the attention of the Republic of Ecuador . . . the need for conserving the irreplaceable natural phenomena of the archipelago, and to save from extinction this living laboratory for the study of evolutionary processes.’
In fact, Ecuador had already made moves to protect the Galápagos with a constitutional amendment in 1934 that placed several islands and most of the Galápagos fauna under protection. But the rest of the world was becoming increasingly vocal about the need to protect the archipelago. We can be pretty certain, I think, that without the Darwinian connection, this concern wouldn’t have been anywhere near as great.
The next big Darwin anniversary in 1959 provided the necessary impetus to do something with the islands. On 4 July that year, Ecuador passed an emergency law to coincide with the centenary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, formally declaring the uninhabited 97 percent of the Galápagos land mass the country’s first national park. It was the first indication that it might yet be possible to realise Franklin D. Roosevelt’s dying wish to preserve the Galápagos ‘for all time as a kind of international park’.
Over in Europe, with the backing of UNESCO and its conservation-minded offshoot, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a bunch of dedicated scientists simultaneously founded the Charles Darwin Foundation for the Galápagos Islands (CDF), an international, non-governmental organisation that aimed ‘to provide knowledge and assistance through scientific research and complementary action to ensure the conservation of the environment and biodiversity in the Galápagos Archipelago’. For UNESCO’s first director general, the visionary Julian Huxley, ‘the preservation of all sources of pure wonder and delight, like fine scenery, wild animals in freedom, or unspoiled nature’ was a key human need. Within five years of its foundation, CDF had an operative base, the Charles Darwin Research Station at the eastern edge of the then single-strip settlement of Puerto Ayora.
At the same time, a group of dedicated Americans kept up the momentum with the Galápagos International Science Project, a symposium attended by dozens of scientists, many of whom took the opportunity to get stuck into the geology and natural history of the islands. In the late 1960s, Ecuador’s central government got around to appointing its first rangers to implement CDF’s recommendations. Since then, the Galápagos National Park Service (GNPS) has steadily grown in stature, ultimately overshadowing CDF to become the single most important institution in the archipelago, employing more than two hundred staff with an annual operating budget of around $15 million. Over the course of the twentieth century then, science and conservation became central to the identity of the islands.
The GNPS has taken on plenty of battles. It’s won some and lost some. There are too many to list—and it would be tedious to do so—but it’s worth mentioning a couple of examples. These show what people can achieve when they put their minds to it and also reveal that there are some things that even the most dedicated conservationists cannot realistically hope to accomplish.
There are few success stories greater than that offered by the islands’ giant tortoises. When CDF began to conduct the first-ever population surveys of the different tortoise species, they found them in a terrible way. Owing to the preference to go ‘turpining’ on those islands with a more accessible, easier-going terrain, the populations on Floreana, Santa Fé and Pinta had collapsed and were either extinct or effectively so. For these species, there was no escape.
The tortoises on Pinzón and Española would certainly have suffered the same fate had the conservation movement not come to the rescue. In the 1960s, Pinzón still had adequate numbers of adult tortoises, but they were old—very old. The invasion of egg- and hatchling-snaffling rats meant that no young tortoises were coming through the ranks, the last recruit to the Pinzón population probably hatching out some time in the nineteenth century. The CDF staff came up with the ingenious solution of excavating tortoise nests before the rats could get at them, then transporting eggs to Santa Cruz to be incubated, hatched and reared in captivity. When the tortoises were big enough to fend off a rat, the plan was to send them back to Pinzón. Almost fifty years later, this strategy is still in place, with the latest crop of captive-reared Pinzón offspring on show at the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz.
On Española, the tortoises were in an even more perilous position. Like Floreana, Santa Fé and Pinta, Española is a relatively accessible island and had also been a favoured spot to harvest tortoises. A few remained, but so few that reproduction had come to a grinding halt. The presence of goats on the island only made matters worse. So conservationists rounded up the last fourteen Española tortoises and brought them to the research station on Santa Cruz. This small band of survivors (supplemented in 1975 by a rather randy Española male that had been hanging out at the San Diego Zoo) has been coaxed into producing over 2,000 offspring. In the meantime, the GNPS managed to eradicate goats from Española, paving the way for the reintroduction of these captive-born youngsters.
The detailed genetic description of each tortoise species has also proved to be very useful for conservationists. Nowhere is this more evident than on Isabela’s Wolf Volcano. Here, geneticists have discovered hybrid tortoises with a wonderful diversity of genes, probably as a result of the activities of buccaneers and whalers moving these reptiles around in the not-so-distant past. Some of these hybrids show clear signs of recent San Cristóbal and Española ancestry. It also turns out that there are descendants of Floreana tortoises, a species that nobody has seen for more than 150 years. Several tortoises even have a smattering of Pinta ancestry. These are of special interest because the last-known Pinta tortoise, Lonesome George, died in 2012 after forty years in forlorn captivity. This makes it possible to think about restoring lineages assumed to have been lost long ago.
Project Isabela
On the larger, higher islands of Santa Cruz, Santiago and Isabela, the tortoises were able to find refuge from the tortoise hunters, but not from the invasion of mammals like pigs and goats. This demanded an extermination programme on an unprecedented scale, the outline of which was put together at a workshop held in the Galápagos in 1997. Project Isabela—an $8.5-million initiative that would synthesise and then build on the existing methods of dealing with alien mammals—was born.
The project started on Pinta, a small goat-infested island shaped like a blunt, spearhead just 11 km from top to bottom and 7 km from side to side. In previous decades, the GNPS had waged a protracted war against these destructive mammals, shooting more than 40,000 over the course of the 1970s alone. But after each goat blitz, it would emerge that a handful of individuals had somehow escaped the hunters’ sights. Pinta became something of a workshop, a testing ground on which to hone eradication methodology, notably the deployment of so-called Judas goats.
Here’s how it works. A goat is captured, fitted with a radio collar and released. As a member of a gregarious species, its natural instinct is to locate and then hang out with others of its kind, leading hunters to the last remaining individuals of a population. Although the idea had been around for several decades prior to Project Isabela, it was on Pinta in the Galápagos that the Judas goat became a serious conservation tool. Trials revealed that the most effective Judas goats were males that had been rendered sterile (with a nifty surgical snip rather than relatively crude castration). In addition, sterilised females treated with a cocktail of drugs to simulate a state of permanent oestrus proved to be an effective add-on, a supplementary tool now referred to as the Mata Hari goat (after the infamous World War I double agent).
With the successful eradication of Pinta’s goats, Project Isabela began to scale up its operation, using a combination of carefully positioned fences to corral animals, aerial sharpshooting from helicopters, more conventional ground-based hunting, specially trained dogs and, where appropriate, the lethal deployment of Judas and Mata Hari goats to exterminate somewhere in the region of 200,000 large mammals from several islands, notably Santiago and northern Isabela. In the aftermath of Project Isabela, the GNPS took on feral goat populations on the inhabited islands. As of 2011, when the GNPS and its collaborators last revealed the status of these operations, there were no feral goats left in the Galápagos except for small populations on San Cristóbal, Santa Cruz and southern Isabela. Even there, however, the recovery of native vegetation has been impressive.
Of course, the work doesn’t stop with a successful eradication. It’s a rather dismal fact, but there are plenty of people who perceive that the conservation movement in the Galápagos has a negative influence on their livelihoods and are prepared to use goats as a political tool, threatening to reintroduce the animals to goat-free islands unless their demands are met. Between 2000 and 2010, it’s reckoned that there were around ten incidents of such sabotage, on average one every year. These reintroductions are more trouble than they sound, as the effort required to seek out and destroy just a few individuals can be huge. In 2009, some malcontent set six goats down on Santiago, which had by then been a goat-free zone for some three years. The GNPS put the cost of removing these animals at $32,393. That’s more than $5,000 a goat.
FIGURE 9.1. The threat of sabotage is ever-present. In 2004, local fishermen threatened to introduce goats to Fernandina, the most pristine island in the archipelago. Reproduced from Victor Carrion et al., ‘Archipelago-wide Island Restoration in the Galápagos Islands: Reducing Costs of Invasive Mammal Eradication Programs and Reinvasion Risk,’ PLoS One 6 (2011): e18835.
With the success of Project Isabela, the GNPS and its partners are now setting their sights on other mammalian invaders. Rats pose a serious problem, notably for invertebrates like the bulimulid snails, birds like the endangered medium tree finch, mangrove finch and Galápagos petrel, and reptiles like the Pinzón tortoise. But how do you get rid of rodents, which are not only fecund but can hide away in the most inaccessible of crevices? At present, the only approach with any chance of success is to put out poison.
At a workshop in the Galápagos in 2007 (precisely analogous to the one that gave rise to Project Isabela a decade earlier), conservationists laid the groundwork for what became known as Project Pinzón. As with Project Isabela, this began on small islands, incorporating lessons learned from each eradication attempt, revising the plan and gradually scaling up to take on larger and larger islands. It’s a massive, military-style undertaking that has been years in the planning. It has been necessary to carry out surveys of each island in detail prior to the release of any poison, to customize bait to suit the arid Galápagos environment, and to conduct a thorough assessment of the risks of the anticoagulant toxin to any of the many non-target species (including feeding the bait to Galápagos tortoises, which mercifully appear unaffected). For those species that face a risk of inadvertent poisoning, it was necessary to develop mitigation strategies. For the Galápagos hawk, it was thought best to bring all birds into captivity during the period they might conceivably dine out on poisoned rat, something that had never been achieved without the death of the hawk.
FIGURE 9.2. Project Pinzón. Conservationists from Island Conservation (a nongovernmental organization specializing in the eradication of invasive species from islands) plan the distribution of rodenticide on South Plaza in 2012. © Rory Stansbury, Island Conservation.
Finally, in January 2011, Project Pinzón entered its operational phase. A helicopter fitted with an industrial-scale hopper sent a steady spray of poison raining over several islets. At 4.9 km2, the largest of these was Rábida, which was declared free of rodents in late 2012. With this success, the GNPS tackled South Plaza (0.2 km2) and Pinzón (18.2 km2) in November 2012. With three vessels acting as floating accommodation for a team of some forty-five staff from several collaborating institutions, the helicopter carried out an intensive double dosing of Pinzón. In 2013, with the island cleared of rats, baby tortoises began to emerge from the dusty Pinzón soil; these youngsters could be the first tortoises to hatch out on their island and survive into adulthood in more than one hundred years.
The plan is to move on to eradicate rodents from even bigger islands like Floreana (172 km2). If Floreana can be rendered rat-free, it should help the recovery of the Floreana mockingbird, shortly to be reintroduced to the main island from the two satellite islets on which it has survived. It might then be the moment to consider rodent eradication on Santiago. At 585 km2, the size of this island will pose a significant challenge. That’s not all. Although the Galápagos is notable for its paucity of land-based mammals, it seems that some kind of rodent reached the archipelago long before humans, giving rise to at least a dozen endemic species, collectively known as the Galápagos rice rats. Unfortunately, the introduction of bigger rats and predatory cats since the arrival of humans in 1535 is thought to have resulted in the extinction of most of these endemic rodents.
For most of the twentieth century, the Santiago rice rat (known only from a single specimen collected in 1906) was assumed to have suffered this irreversible fate. But in 1997, an American biologist and a couple of his students landed on Santiago’s north shore, set up camp and put out a few traps to see what was there. The next morning the trio was astonished to find twenty-five Santiago rice rats in the traps. Somehow these tenacious little natives still survive alongside their more aggressive black rat cousins, perhaps owing to the abundance of food on this part of the island (in the shape of prickly pear opuntias) or possibly the rice rat’s ability to tolerate long periods of drought. Whatever the reason, it is likely that a significant number of Santiago rice rats would have to be trapped and held in captivity prior to (and for several weeks after) the distribution of poisoned bait over the island. It’s a complication for sure, but the Galápagos National Park Service has found workaround solutions to such challenges in the past.
This kind of restoration requires millions of dollars and decades of dedicated work, but this is something the Galápagos has made its own. This effort and other bold initiatives have made this archipelago a world leader in ecological restoration, a feat of which it can be rightly proud.
Insect Trouble
When it comes to alien invertebrates, the story is not quite so inspiring. There are certainly a lot of them—one in every six species in fact. There are several reasons for this. As a general rule, invertebrates are far less conspicuous than vertebrates. It’s also true that most invertebrates are poorly understood. Where do they go after reaching Galápagos shores? How do they occupy their time? What impact do they have on native species? In most cases, the answers to such questions simply don’t exist. If you don’t have a good grasp of these fundamental details, it’s tricky to come up with a method to control intruding populations. Even if you do, the complex life cycles of insects (with phases involving winged dispersal, for instance) stack the odds against success.
The little fire ant is a case in point. In 2000, the World Conservation Union’s Invasive Species Specialist Group published a list of the one hundred worst invasive offenders, and this vicious ant is on it. In the Galápagos, it has been observed to displace native ants and spiders and may even affect the nesting success of birds and reptiles. ‘On the larger islands the little fire ant is now distributed over thousands of hectares and is beyond the means of current methods of control,’ wrote entomologists in 2005. Its successful eradication from the small island of Santa Fé in the 1990s, however, led to an attempt to eradicate it from a small (0.2 km2) area of Marchena (a medium-sized island in the north of the archipelago). Throughout 2001, conservationists spread insecticide over the affected habitat and followed up with intense monitoring, using hot dogs and peanut butter to lure out any survivors. Over the course of six separate visits, they set up more than 160,000 bait stations in the affected area (nobody can accuse them of not being thorough) and found no sign of little fire ants at all. Not one. It looked like the insecticide had done its trick, leading the conservationists to suggest the effort was ‘on the edge of success’. It probably was, but if you don’t get every last one, all that effort counts for nothing. When a new infestation turned up in 2008, the most likely explanation was that some ants had survived the 2001 poisoning. The battle against the little fire ants on Marchena is ongoing and might yet be won. It will, however, be harder to take on invasive invertebrates like these on islands where they are more widely distributed.
Quinine and Other Demons
Efforts to eradicate invasive plants are even more troubled. Over the last few decades there have been serious efforts to kill off the worst offenders. Take the red quinine tree, for instance. It’s thought that someone planted the first seed in 1946. Nobody really knows why. Maybe this person thought there might be some commerce to be had from exploiting its medicinal properties (quinine is known to disrupt the life cycle of the malaria parasite). Whatever the reason, it was unfortunate for many of the Galápagos’ native plants. As a single tree can produce thousands of incredibly light seeds and the resultant seedlings can handle life in the shade, they were quick to establish, blazing a path through agricultural land, infesting the Scalesia forest and spreading into even more rarefied zones dominated by native Miconia and sedges (from around 500m above sea level and up). On Santa Cruz, the quinine tree is now thought to occupy more than 110 km2, which corresponds to roughly 10 percent of the island.
Are these trees doing any harm to the rare habitats they’ve reached? Recent research suggests they are. The closer to one of these quinine trees, the fewer species there are and the thinner their ground coverage. This is particularly evident at the highest elevations, where the quinine cuts out almost all of the light on which low-lying grass, sedge, moss and fern rely. Although no native species appear to have gone extinct as a result, the invasion of this one plant has completely transformed the vegetation structure of these regions.
Rangers have experimented with several methods of eradication, starting by rooting out seedlings and saplings and ending up with the ‘hack-and-squirt’ method, attacking the trunk with a machete and then dressing the wounds with a lick of herbicidal poison. But it’s expensive. It might cost more than $1 million to make one hack-and-squirt pass through all quinine-infested areas of Santa Cruz. If the goal is total eradication, it would take around $8 million in order to keep this up, year in year, year out, for at least a decade or two, and maybe longer.
Without a clear knowledge of how long seeds of a particular species can lie dormant in the earth, predicting such a time frame is little more than guesswork. There’s also no guarantee of success. Of thirty such projects undertaken by the Galápagos National Park Service since the mid-1990s, only four have achieved their stated aim of eradication (and each of these four targeted species had a narrow range and was yet to get out of control). So there’s the very real prospect—terrifying for those funding such an operation—that the species might not be successfully eradicated. Like the little fire ants on Marchena, the red quinine could just reappear. Then what would you have to show for your $8 million?
If eradication is not a realistic option, as it probably isn’t for most introduced plants in the Galápagos, what’s the alternative? The unpalatable truth is that we might have to live with them. Thankfully, many of the introduced species will not cause much damage, and we shouldn’t lose too much sleep about their presence. Others will need to be controlled in hope of containing the impact they have rather than striving to get rid of them completely. In contrast to eradication, which has a clear end point, there is no end to control. As the Red Queen puts it in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, ‘It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.’
This is obviously going to be expensive, unless you can get another species to do the control for you. The parable of the cottony cushion scale insect is a case in point. This pest was first spotted in the Galápagos some thirty years ago, and by 2000 it had spread to most of the major islands in the archipelago. It’s a problem because it sinks its mouthparts into the woody stems of plants, tapping into the sap of a range of species from the white mangrove to Scalesia. Interestingly, the presence of little fire ants may have furthered the scale insect’s influence. The ants have a taste for the sugary honeydew secretion the scale insects produce during feeding, so they will carry these relatively immobile food factories with them when they move and may even defend them against predators. In spite of the minder role played by these ants, conservationists have had some success in keeping the scale insect in check, deliberately introducing yet another non-native insect (a ladybird) to the archipelago in 2002, a conservation manoeuvre unprecedented in the Galápagos. A decade on, the ladybird has become established and appears to be containing the scale insect’s impact on native plants without itself causing any obvious untoward damage.
This kind of biological control is probably the only way to fight against the latest big deal, a parasitic botfly that goes by the scientific name Philornis downsi. In 1997, researchers working on Darwin’s finches on Santa Cruz noticed something ugly, a woodpecker finch nest wriggling with some kind of maggot. The blood-filled guts of these larvae and their presence in the nostrils of a couple of the nestlings made it pretty clear what they’d been up to: feeding. If there were any doubt, one of the chicks soon died, and a post-mortem dissection uncovered a hole bored into the nestling’s brain. The larvae of P. downsi are not fussy in their tastes. This parasite has probably been in the islands for a lot longer than just fifteen years, and we now know it is affecting at least fourteen species of land birds in the Galápagos (which include nine species of Darwin’s finches). It is pretty well established, located on most islands. Several studies reveal the devastating, often lethal effect of these insects on nestlings.
As if this weren’t enough, microscopic pathogens are a constant threat. The introduction of avian malaria and avian pox to Hawaii, for instance, was a major driver in the extinction of many of its native birds. In recent years, two mosquitos have been introduced to the Galápagos, including one that is the known vector for avian malaria. Other agents of disease, including avian influenza and West Nile virus, await the opportunity to skip over from the South American continent.
Due to concern over threats like these, conservationists helped draft the Special Law for Galápagos in 1998 (about which we’ll hear more soon). This led to the creation of the Galápagos Inspection and Quarantine System (SICGAL) (amongst many other things), with the aim of preventing further introductions. Yet the challenge facing the SICGAL inspectors has been of epic proportions. It’s not just the three commercial airlines now serving the Galápagos with more than 160 flights a month. Several cargo ships zip back and forth between Guayaquil and the islands, servicing them with fresh fruit and vegetables, drinking water, grain, beer, construction materials, furniture, fertilizers, vehicles, tyres, gas cylinders and so on. Concentrating on imports of the sixteen most common fresh food items in 2011 (including potatoes, bananas, plantains, yucca and onions), the cargo fleet brought an average of eight hundred tons of these goods to the Galápagos every month. Less than 2 percent of this produce was inspected upon departure or arrival.
How did we get to this point? How did the Galápagos become transformed from an inhospitable outpost where entrepreneurs had a tendency to be murdered to one with such a thriving economy? The answer is complex, of course, but several key influences deserve special mention. During World War II, the United States built a military base and airstrip on Baltra to protect the Panama Canal from a German or Japanese attack. It was a simple enough step, but one with a rather significant fallout for the archipelago. The presence of several thousand servicemen on Baltra demonstrated that, if adequately provisioned, the Galápagos could support a sizeable population. More people also meant greater economic prosperity for the early settlers. ‘The Americans purchased all that could be fished, caught and produced. And at a good price,’ wrote Norwegian Stein Hoff. With the Americans providing detailed oceanographic charts, the fishing became ‘better than ever and the income sky high’. Most importantly, though, the airstrip made it possible to entertain commercial flights to the Galápagos and fuelled the rapid demographic expansion of Santa Cruz. Ironically, the Darwin legend, the protection afforded by conservationists and UNESCO’s celebration of the Galápagos as its very first World Heritage Site in 1978 conspired with predictable consequence. People began to want to visit.
The Galápagos National Park Service responded by setting up its first dedicated visitor sites in the 1970s, short trails through the landscape marked with white posts from which tourists were not permitted to stray. It also instigated its guiding system, with tourists accompanied at all times by a highly qualified guide, someone who could act as a stand-in policeman to ensure nobody turned a blind eye to the rules. ‘Take only pictures, leave only footprints’ sums up the attitude. In many ways, it was a model operation. Beyond the little white posts and the weathered path, there is very little evidence that the nearly constant human footfall has done much to change the wider ecology or even the behaviour of the animals.
But the immediate impact of tourism on the landscape—which is what the Galápagos authorities paid most attention to at first—is not really the issue. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems obvious that those making decisions about the future of the Galápagos should have paid more attention to human behaviour. The international community, the Ecuadorian government, and the Galápagos authorities should have anticipated the population expansion that occurred during the twentieth century and taken serious steps to minimise the damage it would cause. Even conservationists failed to build a human dimension into their thinking, and it’s easy to see why. For most conservation-minded folk, their love of the natural world got them into the business. But we now know—and the Galápagos is a perfect case in point—that if conservationists fail to consider the needs of humans, they ignore a vital part of the ecology.
