88.5 WFDD - galapagos islands: Recent Episodes
Genevieve Valentine
A giant tortoise on Santa Cruz Island in the Galapagos Islands.
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One of the longest-running jokes in The Good Place is about almond milk.
After the big twist in the show's first season, moral philosopher Chidi Anagonye agonized about being condemned to The Bad Place, and decided early on what had tipped the scales: "I used almond milk in my coffee, even though I knew about the negative environmental impact." For ages, it's a running joke that such a particular infraction could be the thing that condemned him. But eventually, they get a look at the judgment system and realize he was right all along: Every decision has consequences, and nothing is decided in a vacuum.
It's impossible not to think of Chidi and his many philosophical thought-exercises-slash-inescapable-moral-quagmires while reading On the Backs of Tortoises. Nominally an environmental and social history of the Galápagos Islands, Prof. Elizabeth Hennessy lays bare the many intertwined issues that confront us as we attempt conservation efforts in complex situations, while faced with a sweeping ecological crisis.
The tortoises of the Galápagos are "keystone species and ecosystem engineers," and since sailors first began using the islands in 1535, they have been the most obvious barometer of the effect of people on an ecosystem. (Hennessy notes grimly that "three of the fifteen species" that originally populated the islands "exist only as historical records.")
Using tortoises as a marker, Hennessy traces the various ways the islands — and nature itself — has been framed, both by opportunists and by conservationists. By turns, tortoises are food or natural treasure; they must be carefully sheltered or made celebrities for their own good. The islands spend time as a prison colony, promised frontier for settlers, American military base, and national park with a controversial tourist industry. The thread of natural conservation runs throughout, but even there, the meaning has changed. For Walter Rothschild a century ago, it was collection of specimens. Now, it is attempts to breed tortoises for release into a wilderness that's being shaped by the introduction of foreign animals and plants. (In 1957, fishers left three goats on Pinta island for food. Their eradication has become a cottage industry, with thousands of kills a month that are left to rot; nothing is easily parsed.)
And much like poor Chidi getting frequent moral paralysis in the face of complexities or a looming crisis, moments in On the Backs of Tortoises can be tough reading, with very few answers for some very pressing questions about culture, politics, and blackberries (an invasive species whose presence on the island is a growing problem).
Hennessy is clear about the futility in dreaming of a pristine pre-1535 Galápagos, unpopulated and untouched — "There is no return to Eden," she says — but the current problems can feel extremely immediate, and the current solutions not particularly hopeful. The tortoises that do hatch at the tourist-friendly breeding center are springing from a very small pool, and are released into islands full of rats that prey on them, goats that eat their food, and people whose needs will only grow. Where do you begin?
But this book isn't meant to offer easy answers. Early on, we read the old story about "turtles all the way down" — the concept that the world is balanced on the back of an ever-expanding stack of helpful Testudinidae. But as Hennessy points out, such an idea doesn't actually indicate that there's a single answer to a difficult question; rather, that stack of tortoises suggests that, if we're looking for balance, there's always something more to learn beneath the things we think we know.
This book works the same way, beginning with a gripping history and then delving deeper — the world of the Galapagos becomes more complicated as we go, until we understand the underpinnings of any decision (almond milk or otherwise). It's a book about the ways we need to understand how deeply everything is entangled, and just how far down it goes. The result is a well-researched and thought-provoking read — whether you're well-versed in the intricacies of conservation or have only just begun to long for a look at the tortoises yourself. On the Backs of Tortoises is a natural history that asks important questions, and challenges us to think about how best to answer them.
Genevieve Valentine's latest novel is Icon.
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The sea squirt Ascidia sydneiensis, a tubelike animal that squirts water out of its body when alarmed, is one of 48 additional nonnative marine species in the Galapagos Islands documented in a newly published study. Previously, researchers knew o
Courtesy of Jim Carlton
The Galapagos Islands are like a biological ark in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Giant tortoises live there, and swimming iguanas, and numerous species found nowhere else. It's one of the world's most protected places.
But scientists have discovered that dozens of exotic species have invaded the Galapagos — underwater.
Marine biologist James Carlton remembers when he first got to thinking that the famously wild Galapagos, a World Heritage, might not be as pristine as people thought. "On my first visit to the Galapagos," he recalls, "I collected some samples from a boat bottom." He found barnacles, sponges and other hitchhikers.
That was in 1987. Carlton didn't know if the creatures he found were native or not. So about four years ago, he and a team of scientists decided to return and take a closer look.
"We didn't know quite what to expect," he says. They already knew there were lots of invasive species — species not native to the Galapagos — on land. But in the surrounding ocean, there were only five known species of invaders. Everything else, presumably, was native.
When Carlton's team looked underwater, however, they found a horde of invaders. "Now we have 53, which is a rather stunning increase," says marine biologist Gregory Ruiz, who was on the trip. "It's about a tenfold increase."
He says there's no question now: "The Galapagos has been invaded" underwater.
Ruiz says they found exotic species clinging to pilings, docks and mangrove roots. The researchers hung plastic plates underwater and all sorts of alien invertebrates latched on.
It's hard to tell where the invaders came from, Ruiz says. But rising tourism in the Galapagos means more boats, docks and pilings — transportation and homes for invasives, wherever their initial source was.
At the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland, where Ruiz works, there's something called the "invasions lab." About forty researchers work there, tracking invasive species around the world. Ruiz points out a gelatinous blob in a glass bowl of alcohol.
"This is an organism that we found in the Galapagos," he says, "it's a tunicate." It's commonly known as a sea squirt, a tube-like animal that squirts water out of its body when alarmed. "It often attaches to the underside of docks or on vessels," Ruiz explains.
More invaders sit in glass bowls filled with alcohol — barnacles, algae, sea anemones. The creatures are described in the journal Aquatic Invasions. In all, the team of scientists found 48 additional marine species that came from somewhere else.
These organisms aren't just footnotes in a biology text. Zebra mussels, for example, invaded the Great Lakes in the U.S. and caused havoc. A tiny parasite called MSX has killed millions of oysters in the Chesapeake Bay on the East Coast. Invasives can outcompete and push out native species.
Carlton, a professor emeritus at Williams College, says tracking invaders helps authorities stem their spread. Nonetheless, he expects that the situation in the Galapagos isn't unique: The explosion in international trade and boat traffic and tourism is probably ushering invaders into many tropical locales.
But in a protected place like the Galapagos, their presence means something's been lost.
"We value a world that we think represents nature before we began altering it," Carlton says, "before we began removing species, adding species and changing the abundance of species."
Places such as the Galapagos are windows into that former world, as well as a living history tour of how evolution works to create unusual forms of life. "In fact," Carlton says, "we're studying only the result of alterations by human activity in just a couple of hundred years."
Ironically, he adds, the author of the theory of evolution, Charles Darwin, may have contributed to the alteration of the Galapagos. Darwin's ship, the HMS Beagle, sailed there in 1835 after visiting what is now Brazil, Argentina, Chile and several other places — bringing with it, in most likelihood, alien invaders.
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The Blue-Footed Booby
David Anchundia
SciWorks Radio is a production of 88.5 WFDD and SciWorks, the Science Center and Environmental Park of Forsyth County, located in Winston-Salem.
The Galapagos islands are famous for their association with Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution by natural selection. Being isolated, the islands acted much like a controlled laboratory for clear observation of basic evolutionary adaptations among species.
Within the Galapagos also live species which have not yet had their evolution defined by the islands’ environment. Interestingly, they may be relying on some more deep-seated and complex survival strategies.
Blue-Footed Boobies are large sea birds that live in the eastern Pacific ocean. They’re tropical. They’re fish-eating.
That’s Doctor David Anderson, professor of Biology at Wake Forest University, here in Winston Salem. He has been studying Blue-Footed Boobies since the early 1980s. Along the way he found that an interesting thing was beginning to happen to these birds.
We had a healthy population of blue-footed boobies there. They appeared every year. They produced offspring every year. And then in 1997 that stopped and we didn't see them again in any kind of meaningful numbers. That was a clue that some issue was happening. We noticed a breeding problem but we didn't notice a mortality problem. We don't see dead birds laying around.
Dr. Anderson and his team set about several studies to figure out why this was happening, and have come down to one likely hypothesis.
So in 2011 we started a two-year study looking at breeding biology across the whole place, all the major colonies, and found that indeed they're not breeding. They sometimes attempt, not as much as you would expect, and when they attempt they pretty much always fail. They show that they're interested in breeding with courtship behavior. That's one thing blue-footed boobies are famous for. The blue feet are about impressing the other sex. They do a lot of trying to impress each other but they decide not to actually go through with reproductive attempt. So they’re not producing young individuals to replace natural deaths of older individuals. Our accounts indicate that the population size is only about one-third of what it was in the early 1970s. A simple population model suggests that it's just due to failure to breed. We think it's a food supply problem. These guys, in the past when they were breeding well, focused on a particular fish species which is a sardine — a really rich food source. It's high in fat, so lots of energy. When you find one sardine you find lots of them because they school. But now we find not nearly as much sardine as we did in the past. They’re still finding some but they're not getting enough to actually go through with the breeding attempt. We think that the sardine availability cycles on a very long period, and we have evidence from nearby that this is true. That when sardines are common for about twenty or thirty years another kind of fish, anchovies, are not so common and vice versa. However in Galapagos we don't have the anchovies to take the place of the sardines.
Boobies on the mainland of South America do indeed thrive on anchovies when sardines are not plentiful. But the Galapagos population is denied this alternate food source, according to Dr. Anderson.
The driving purpose of all life is to reproduce. Clearly you can’t reproduce if you don’t survive. A couple billion years of survival have built in some interesting evolutionary methods of coping with hard times and Dr. Anderson believes the Boobies are using one of these strategies. Its like waiting for financial stability before having kids. Sort of…
We speculate that it has to do with not so much raising a chick, but it's more about later, when a recently independent offspring has to forage for itself, but it's a boneheaded teenager basically, and it struggles to deal with a difficult environment. We think the parents are abandoning reproductive attempts because they're predicting in five months there’s not going to be enough sardines for their juveniles to be able to make it, so why invest in an offspring that is not going to be able to actually survive later on.
Does this all mean that the Galapagos Blue-Footed Booby is headed for extinction?
We don't think that they're never going to breed during these poor conditions; they may get a little bit of breeding done. I think it's unlikely that we're going to see the extinction of this population due to this cycle. But if you overlay onto this natural problem some sort of human-caused problem, then it could possibly tip them over the edge.
This Time Round, the theme music for SciWorks Radio, appears as a generous contribution by the band Storyman and courtesy of UFOmusic.com.
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