(Photo Credit: Tim Howard)
When our producer Tim Howard landed in the Galapagos, fresh from his honeymoon, he had the ghost of Darwin and dreams of Eden in his head. But he found something very different from what Darwin would¹ve seen. With a local election just days away, Tim discovered a strange new tension between the people who live there and the people who want to preserve the archipelago's incredible ecology. We meet the tortoises, those massive, lumbering creatures that mystified Darwin, and then we meet one of the most worst threats the tortoises have ever seen: the goats.
Nobody wants to see the tortoises disappear, as conservationists Linda Cayot, Karl Campbell, and Josh Donlan explain, but actually protecting the tortoises' home can be grisly, brutal work.
Comments [4]
When the story got to the people living on the island attacking the national park buildings, I got pretty upset. Not with the national park, but with those people.
They shouldn't be living on that island if they can't use the resources in a sustainable manner. And if they kidnapped people and threw molotov cocktails, then they deserve whatever they get. I'm on the tortoises' side on this one.
Oh, and goats suck. I 100% agree with exterminating them. They're like plus-size rats.
The goats genocide in Galapagos was an absolutely awful revolting story. This is science at its worst. Galapagos is not that important, not for science and not even for evolution. 250,000 wild goats were killed to honor the god of conservationism. Barbaric!
Judas Goats!
Thanks for this wonderful program. Brings back memories of our trip there years ago.
BUT I suggest you DO read Darwin's Voyage. Turns out Darwin did NOT himself notice the differences among the tortoise shells. He collected tortoises and upon dining with the locals (many living there then, surprise)was amazed to hear them casually pointing out which island each tortoise came from. That surprised him. So he took a bit more notice.
Also, finches? Well, Darwin didn't get that quite right either. It took getting back home and contacting another scientist to clarify what was going on. And that's the guy that drew them too. I haven't got the book handy or I'd do a better job of identifying names.
I'm listening to the goat part. Your emphasis seemed odd. Killing goats? Wish you'd talked about why they were there in the first place: to feed the sailors stationed there by ships to collect tortoises for the ships. It seems tortoises can live for a year without food or water, so gathering up hundreds to place onboard ships meant food on the ship for a long time. The story is not the goats, but the tortoise gathering. Amazing. Hundreds were "harvested" for ships passing by. So,it wasn't really that "tortoises got their home back." It was that tortoises were being decimated. Goats were a byproduct of a food enterprise. But yes, good to get rid of the goats. (Why not do that by sterilization though??)
And those people? Galapagos was used as a prison for years. Not just tourists. ha
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