My family travelled to the Galapagos in 2010. We hoped to return but that may not happen.
So, today we’ll travel to the Eastern Pacific Island group in our memory aided by our photos and a short piece I wrote for Empty Nest magazine.
As you know, these remote islands gained fame as a result of a visit by British naturalist Charles Darwin in September and October of 1835.
Finches
After landing at Seymour Airport (GPS) on Baltra Island, following a nine hundred kilometre, two hour plus flight from Quito, our attention was drawn to several nondescript birds just outside the terminal .
“They are some of Darwin’s finches,” Chris Eckert, a biology professor from Queen’s University in Kingston told us back in February 2010. Chris was along as a resource person for our expedition. “This is the mecca for evolutionary studies,” he enthused.
There are 17 different types of finches (cactus finches) on the Galapagos. These finches have different beaks, depending on which island the reside. That demonstrates they have adapted to different types of food. They’ve changed over time through natural selection.
Darwin’s analysis took many years. He turned his bird specimens over to ornithologist John Gould. Soon Gould delivered the “unexpected and startling news” that the finches “belonged to a new group of birds previously unknown and found only in the Galapagos,”
Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 twenty-four years after visiting the Galapagos on his five-year journey. There was, of course, pushback from the scientific community. Perhaps surprisingly, there wasn’t significant opposition from UK Christian Church community.
More recently, in 2005, Dr. Eckert noted that: “even though the theory of evolution dominates academia, 47 per cent of Americans are creationists, and creation science is taught in 15-20 per cent of U.S. schools? How about the fact that 40 per cent of Americans believe human beings were formed in the exact state we are now, or that 52 percent believe dinosaurs co-existed with humans?”
Hmm!
Back to our trip. Shortly after we boarded the M/V Santa Cruz and in the coming days visited several other unique Galapagos Islands. North Seymour, for example, featured blue footed boobies (below) and frigate birds.
The Galapagos, a province of Ecuador, and is made up of 18 main islands. Ecuador is a poor country so that it is remarkable that decision makers and environmentalists are invested in protecting the sustainability of the islands in a way that I wish we could do here.
The Galapagos, a province of Ecuador, and is made up of 18 main islands. Ecuador is a poor country so that it is remarkable that decision makers and environmentalists are invested in protecting the sustainability of the islands in a way that I wish we could do here.
One way they do this is by limiting the number of visitors and requiring they be accompanied by a local guide. The year we travelled just 80,000 visitors were permitted. In 2023, a record-breaking nearly 330,000 tourists explored the islands. Concerns have been expressed with this escalation.
What’s Going on with those Eastern Island Tomato Plants?
In the last month new research has put forward the idea that some tomatoes in the Galápagos actually seem to be going backwards, not forwards in evolutionary terms Call it De-evolution, or reverse evolution,
“It’s not something we usually expect,” Adam Jozwiak, a molecular biochemist at UC Riverside and lead author of a study said. “But here it is, happening in real time, on a volcanic island,” he told Newsweek magazine. Tomato plants on westerly warmer islands don’t seem to be experiencing this change.
It isn’t a concept that easy to explain. The theory is that modern tomatoes and other plants all make use of alkaloids. These tomatoes seem to be making the wrong alkaloids.
“Instead of creating the alkaloids that the researchers expected to see in a tomato, the de-evolving plants are churning out a version of alkaloids that have the same molecular fingerprint as eggplant relatives from millions of years ago,” Newsweek reported.
It is hard to say whether devolving tomatoes are a good thing, a bad thing or just a new challenge to further understanding of evolution. *
Most visitors come to the Islands to see the unique wildlife, like blue-footed boobies and marine iguanas, that you can’t find anywhere else. Al Purdy visited around 1980. He must have gone to North Seymour as you can imagine from the ending of his poem Birdwatching at the Equator.
The blue booby’s own capsule
comment about evolution:
If God won’t do it for you
do it yourself:
stand up
sit down
make love
have sone babies
catch fish
dance sometimes
admire your feet
friggit:
what else is there?
*A good description of the de-evolving tomatoes can be found at Scientists Stunned As Tomatoes “De-Evolve” in the Galapagos
