Galapagos

Jul 16, 2014

Today, the strange story of a small group of islands that raise a big question: is it inevitable that even our most sacred natural landscapes will eventually get swallowed up by humans? And just how far are we willing to go to stop that from happening?

We are dedicating a whole hour to the Galapagos archipelago, the place that inspired Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection. 179 years later, the Galapagos are undergoing rapid changes that continue to pose -- and possibly answer -- critical questions about the fragility and resilience of life on Earth.

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wait you're listening you're listening to Radio Lab radio from WNYC

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and NPR hey I'm Chad a perm rod I'm Robert krulwich this is Radiolab and today

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we begin on a plane thank you Brooke which carried our newly married producer Tim Howard to the Galapagos so I took the plane from Quito we had just finished a honeymoon that morning announcements and the certain point the flight attendants they open up all of the overhead bins and they walk up and down spraying some sort of insecticide for

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for a like invasive species I think yeah like whatever bugs might have snuck on the plane but this point I'm getting super excited and I'm thinking about Darwin and I start reading Voyage of the beagle his book on this Nook that I had bought for the trip but then my power supply didn't work and my Nook died that's a big problem for Darwin to run out of power is look oh God and then the islands come into sight

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what is the color of the Pacific Ocean when you look out the plane window that was actually the first thing I notice it's this totally wild like I've never seen like this storybook blue green iridescent aquamarine and I'm thinking like wow this is going to be like dropping into another world you know like nature in its purest form my version was is my dream and what I would like is you land on and it's sort of like low grassy knoll and an enormous Turtle comes

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the one that you could sit on the top of and it wouldn't notice that you were there just kind of meet you at the airport just wondering by m exactly that's very similar to what I was picturing

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but land we take the 40 minute bus ride to Puerto ayora

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well I over which turns out to be kind of a big town tons of people out there who don't like fishing Village tons no it's way bigger than a fishing Village and just let me say that my first hours in Galapagos were totally different than I was expecting

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good it's sort of the first thing that really just like where the hell am I I am walking through the town it's kind of late sun is just starting to set I'm actually walking down Charles Darwin Avenue

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just kind of getting the lay of the land when all of a sudden

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this line of cars comes around the corner

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honking endless honking

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and they're waving flags blue flags at first I didn't know what that was happening but turns out it was an election rally and I was just really blown away that this continue this procession for like 15 minutes

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and I remember asking one guy they're driving so slow I can just walk up to them I sold Carla who's your candidate and they're like

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jelly jelly or follow whichever I didn't know who the guy was but turns out he was the incumbent and I'm like is he gonna win and this guy he like doesn't even say anything he just kind of points you like point at the cars in front and behind as if like dude seriously you see how many of us there are but then at a certain point I noticed this one guy by himself standing on the sidewalk wearing a white shirt and jeans he's waving a flag but his flag is a different color

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it's white and it's really loud but I go up to him and I yell at him who's your candidate he said I am a candidate and I'm like what are you seriously so his name is Leo need no need he is a naturalist guide you actually end up meeting a lot of people employed that way in Galapagos and he tells me so I'm also young Outsider political politically speaking he is an outsider

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of course I'm wondering why he's standing there by himself waving a flag at this entire parade of people who don't support him at all and he tells me Seattle momento well I'm nervous alien how to react if the party in power now the Front Runners if they get elected they'll photo or sciutto a cierto and I see a dark and uncertain Futures Grande hotel is more big hotels more of these enormous boats more people

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oil and if things keep going this way who's going to stand up for nature

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this is Radiolab and we are dedicating the entire hour to this little set of islands and to that question as the world is filling up with more and more and more people is it inevitable that even the most sacred pristine places on the planet will eventually get swallowed up and how far are we willing to go to return a place to what it was before we got there and more importantly

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can we know I'm never a doubter okay so this is Linda Linda Kayo currently the science advisor for Galapagos Conservancy I began my working Galapagos in 1981 she first came to study tortoises back then you know Galapagos was really isolated barely any cars super limited electricity all I remember is having a smile on my face all the time because you know as a biologist going to Galapagos is like going to Mecca

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she says your violins with massive volcanoes forests tree ferns that grow you know well above a human's height yeah I mean powerful colors you know is green Mangrove black lava flows and pink flamingos this is Mattias Espinosa and naturalist guide in the Galapagos and like Linda he says that when he first got to the Galapagos in the 80s he couldn't believe that the place was real to his breast taken he

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an island called Fernandina and the first thing I saw was a lava fluid was moving

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that's what's going on you know no it's not lava flows are like 1000 she iguanas taking a sunbath

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and he says he would go on his Dives can you imagine

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schools of hammerhead sharks like 500 800 passing in front of you like tuna I mean like like Sergeant it shows you the power to choose you all through Evolution there is revolutions very strong

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okay so quick context Galapagos Islands cluster of islands way off the coast of Ecuador in the Pacific 19 bigger islands bunch of smaller ones and this is the place of course where Darwin landed in 1835 and as he went Island to Island he started noticing that there were all these creatures that were really similar to each other but also a little bit different the tortoises had different shells depending on the kind of Island they

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lived on the finches look similar but their beaks were always a little bit different and this gets him thinking what if it isn't the way that everybody always says what if God didn't create every single species in the beginning and leave them unchanged what if in fact life is purely change what if everything has been changing all the time Darwin's five weeks on Galapagos push him to develop his theory of evolution and that's also why when we think of evolution we think of the Galapagos in particular

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we think of two iconic creatures the tortoise

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and the finch

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let me start by telling you about the tortoise it's hot it's bright it's such a perfect day for tortoise hunting or not hunting but you know looking for fourth day I was there I went to the island of floreana which Darwin visited and they're up in the highlands basically in the middle of this yard oh my God

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there are these three massive tortoises

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just clustered together under a tree

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wow that is freaking amazing describe them what do they look like these are such alien looking creatures they're like the size of geez I don't even know what their massive they look like they would crush you to death when how many years these guys have been here for they can live for over a hundred fifty years wow this is a tortoise trying to get over a branch

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who is that that is the sound of a tortoise breathing that's cool so Linda when she first went to Galapagos to study these tortoises about 30 years ago I did a trip where we backpacked around the Caldera she took a trip to this island called Isabella hike up the side of a volcano and looked at all the tortoise country and it was an impenetrable Forest

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basically tortoise heaven and what makes it so perfect for tortoises is in the dry season and Galapagos the Gerudo which is a very very thick Mist comes onto the island it rolls over this forest and it catches in the branches of the trees the water that drips down from the top of the trees down to the ground creating what we call drip pools

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which provides tortoises with water during the dry season and they like to rest in water and so they're under the trees you have these ponds with dozens of toward its domes just rising out of the water

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so that was my first experience it was a magical magical area and then I actually didn't get back there for maybe 15 years from when I was there the first time and when I returned that forest was a hundred percent gone

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the drip pools were just dry dust bowls wow there was no shade tortoises were sitting out in the sun or crowded around the couple of stalks that were still there this is Coral Kimball I work for Island conservation and I'm based here in the Galapagos Islands Carl's actually the guy who showed me those tortoises it was just you know was a Barren landscape yeah Barren Barren grounds what happened to the forest goats goats

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that was definitely not what I thought you were gonna say I thought you could say people it was kind of a collaboration so here's the story goats were originally set of brought to the Galapagos probably by Pirates and while has back in the 1500s you had tons of sailors making these these long voyages across the Pacific and Galapagos was you know they major port on on the Wailing route where you come and get fresh water but you'd also come in and pick up tortoises land

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tortoises and you know boat to take away several hundred of them often and turn them upside down and they can last for up to a year and a half in the hold of the ship like lying they're upside down yeah line they're upside down in order to make space for the tortoises The Wailers and Pirates would often take goats that they brought with them and throw them onto the islands that way when they're on their way back and sick of eating tortoises they could grab those goats so Whalers and Buccaneers they introduce goat

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Galapagos but on islands like Isabella which is this massive Island size of Rhode Island the goats were actually penned into just a little part of it because there was this black lava rock that ran across the island stream Lee rough lava that's extremely difficult to walk across 12 miles of it so that had acted as a barrier basically with goats on one side tortoises on the other but according to Linda sometime in the late 1970s the goats got Brave

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we were probably talking just a few goats but by the 1990s those few goats the population had exploded and about a hundred thousand two goats and if you think of a hundred thousand goats eating everything in their path every sort of plant that even the bark off of trees they destroy the forest so now they had a dilemma on the one hand the tortoise is needed help on the

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hand you had all of these goats that didn't choose to be on the island you know it wasn't their fault and the goats that were out there were gorgeous you know they had curled horns different colored fur just beautiful animals and they've been there for five hundred years some people were concerned you know with goats have their own set of if you will right to be there those arguments came up frequently to which Carl would respond yeah are we going to let tortoises go extinct yeah there's thousands of islands around the world

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have goats on them these tortoises are only found here so where do your values lie

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and so in 1994 we had what we call the tortoise Summit in England and that was where we started the discussions about what are we gonna do experts came from all over the world Linda says we want to get rid of the goats and many of them thought we were nuts and then it was impossible there's a hundred thousand of them so many doubters Carl says even heard the idea why don't you put Lawns yeah they eat goats in Africa yeah why don't you get Lions on there

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R and those are really interesting ideas but at some point they're going to get hungry and they're going to start eating all the other things that you know you treasure bike the occasional tourist and then he keys after endless planning and meetings took 8 years I think they commenced

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project Isabella

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so the helicopters were used are called MD 500 s small helicopter therefore for passengers with One Pilot single turbine five blades this is Frasier Frasier Sutherland I was the engineer pilot and a sharpshooter 2004 through 2006 almost every day during that time Frasier would fly or for Isabela Island two guys with two Shooters either side of the helicopter what you do is so you come across and you're flying along and you might see one goat says you follow that gold is it ran away till joint it's friends do you have to find all those other goats

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Uncle real low it fly around them round them up try and get them in a single group and then

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we start picking off the goats one by one by one and they're actually videos online where you see these packs of goats running for their lives and then dropping to the ground

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the last goat or two might sort of run into a area where it's impossible to reach I'm actually go into caves and what we do is would find a location as close as we could all right on top of the cave drop out one of the two shooters that was in the helicopter and had physically go into the cave shoe the goats out or shoot them on sight and then you go on and actually in under a year through this aerial attack they end up wiping out 90% of the goats on Isabella

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but to give an example of the nature of this business that's Josh Tomlin he runs an NGO that was involved in Project Isabella it's relatively easy to remove 90% of ago population from an island but as they become rare and rare they're harder and harder to detect Two Goats become quote educated they learned that this sound means

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so the goat start hiding so they're going to bushes they won't move to learn to stand under a tree holding their breath and so you end up flying around in an expensive helicopter not finding it goes now the way we deal with that is an interesting one we use this technique called Judas goats

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yeah Judas codes initially it was Carl suggestion because goats a gregarious and like being in groups their herd animals right and so the technique that we would use was you would fire up your helicopter you fly around and find some ghosts you have two goats capture them lie then come back back to base camp I'll flood them and we put a radio collar on and you throw them back on the island

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and then you wait instinctively that loan go we'll go and find out the goes all week two weeks go by

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you fire up the helicopter they get back over the island with this little device it's a directional antenna start tracking the Judas goat till they spot it with some other goats and then everyone gets shot except the Judas go

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they let it go finds more friends and then everyone gets shot except the Judas go and then they do it again everyone gets shot except the Judas go and you do that every two weeks for a year oh my God and that is how they go from 90 percent Go free 291 292 293 294 so this like having a program on you over and over and over again Jesus it gets

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now Judas goat is a good Judas go until it gets pregnant because then it doesn't want to be social anymore it goes off and has his kid and is very solitary which is the last thing you want when you're trying to get goats off Islands so Carl kept mulling this problem what would it take to basically make the the perfect you disco the ideal Judas goat if you will is a goat that would search for and be searched for and that would never get pregnant so curl Campbell figure it out

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technique where we could sterilize them in the field grab the goat stardom and then in a matter of minutes snip snip did you do this yeah well I stood next to call and watched him do it and Carl took it one step further and he actually gave these females hormone implants basically put them into heat for an extended duration normally a female goat would be in heat for maybe a couple days these females would go more than a hundred ninety days

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and wherever they went they would lure those male goats out of their caves so that you know

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all in all over the course of this two-year program we had hundreds of Judas goats out and using those goats they were able to go from 94% goat free to 96 to 97 to 98 and basically when you have only Judas goat meeting up with other Judas codes then you can say the goats have been eliminated but you're down a point they got to at least on Isabella in mid-2006

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this kind of eradication program was far beyond anything that anyone had ever done anywhere in the world

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because turns out they weren't just doing this on Isabela Island now we're talking about Island by Island over the course of about seven years they eliminate over 250,000 goats so you you complete that with Isabella and did it work

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yeah the results of this were absolutely impressive you had plants re-emerging you had trees growing back and in a really short period of time and this allowed for those important drip pools

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and tortoises they basically got their home back

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this is the real thing

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tortoises walking around

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I think Gravely

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so they did it they got all the goats not all the goats when I mean those Judas goats they kept them around why I would just I would have shot them first just out of sympathy for them yeah exactly well they needed the goats because well

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there was the problem of people because during the 90s these demonstration started to happen demonstrations of outrage and violent activity constant conflict to explain

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this is Agustin Lopez long time fisherman and he told me that in the 70s and 80s all year round no restrictions and start making a killing fishing sea cucumber because there is a huge demand but then the national park comes in same group that's doing the goat erratic Asian and they tell the fishermen they're overfishing the sea cucumber they've got to limit their catch and the fishermen are like who are you to tell me that I can't feed my family

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so they lash out

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they March down Charles Darwin Avenue they would come down the street throwing rocks and sticks and everything and that's Paul Watson founder of the Sea Shepherd conservation Society he was their counter protesting and he says that at one point they went after National Park buildings and they were attacking the ranger stations with Molotov cocktails it blockaded roads they literally drove the Rangers out of the national park headquarters and took it over on Isabella they burn down a building they kidnap some people including some of my crew

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and they even killed dozens of tortoises slitting their throats According to some accounts they even hung them from trees

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not only that but according to Linda those goats couple islands where they've been eliminated fisherman of put them back really oh yeah and so what they decided to do is leave the Judas coats on various islands where they can live out their sterilized days chomping on grass

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sharing War Stories until such time

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as it might be needed again

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is the is the war between the greens and the and the fishermen and such is that still hot and difficult and are they still you know killing tortoises and they're not the fishermen they seem to have stopped you know taking over National Park and killing tortoises to know why it it's a combination of reasons on the one hand fishermen have started to participate in the actual fisheries management

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more because it seems like they realize if they're going to keep their livelihood they can't just fish everything out but then at the same time the tourism economy has been taking off and so all of these fishermen they find that it's easier for them to actually survive by using their boats to take tourists around Island to Island so they're all kind of converting over into the tourism economy huh we're going to take a short break this is Radiolab will be back with producer Tim Howard and this hour on Galapagos in just a moment hi this is Linda kiyo

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Jeff Garlin Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the P Sloan Foundation enhancing public understanding of Science and Technology in the modern world tour information about loan and www at www.atlona.com org and this message

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I'm Jedi boom run I'm Robert krulwich this is Radiolab and this hour well the honeymoons over Galapagos this is the place where Darwin began to develop his theory of evolution and it's the place a hundred seventy year or maybe a hundred eighty years later where our producer Tim Howard landed wearing fishnets and a Bad Brains t-shirt like to find it to find a very different landscape than what Darwin saw and we just told you a story about how far humans are willing to go to protect something this next part it's about how far were willing to go to get

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something back that we've already lost two sort of restore a place in a creature to its quote wild State this story unfolds on one of Galapagos is most northern islands where they also had to get rid of some goats it's called Pinta yeah Pinta is a very special place this is James Gibbs professor of conservation biology at the State University of New York it's a one of those islands it's not part of any tourist visitation site so there are no people there and when you set foot first on Pinta you immediately

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Lee sense sheer abundance

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I'll be insect life

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all the birds problem is unpin a things were spinning out of control the vegetation was growing wild the forest was getting overgrown with the wrong kind of plan and the whole ecosystem was just teetering out of balance and one of the reasons for this according to Linda Kyoto is that we had an island with no tortoises

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because tortoises are are sort of like the lawn mowers you know they plowed down vegetation disperse seeds but for centuries had been hunted by those Whalers and in about 1906 the Pinta tortoise went extinct 1906 yeah a little over a hundred years ago they don't know the exact date but then one evening in March of 1972 yes this Fellow Pizza CH Richard he's a well-known tortoise researcher you

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on Santa Cruz Island having dinner with some friends and we got into chatting about tortoises and one of the people he's eating with says Hey I was recently on Pinta Island collecting snails and I saw this tortoise

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and I thought do you know what you have done that we don't sort of deserve a hundred years he and the national park rangers race out to Pinta and there it was just beautiful tortoise one male tortoise maybe 50 years old they weren't sure they'd eventually named him George Lonesome George but at the time the immediate question was other anymore because if they could find a female for George then they could you know maybe D extinct the

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so they poke around in the areas where we got the one and I found a shell of the female hey Hannibal now it will happen what how had how had this female tortoise died someone chopped in half no see the marks where it was just chopped up

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I felt violent I wanted to borrow someone's gun and go and kill the person everyone held out hopes for just finding more tortoises back James says the kept going back combing the island of highly trained tortoise sniffing dogs but in the end there's just George not then shifted the focus on now what do we do we then went to a wolf Volcano Island next door and collected two females to females it sort of looked like George but weren't quite the same species and we put

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with George to see if we could get him to breed he never did wasn't interested so they thought hmm maybe he needs a pinto lady so now of course there are no female tortoises on Pinta but they thought you know maybe a zoo somewhere Private Collection has on because you really never know so they called around offered huge cash rewards people sent in dozens of tortoises but Linda took one look at them and was like no no no no they weren't pintus so then they thought we've got to take matters

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into our own hands basically what you do is you sit at the back of the tortoise and first you have to get to where they'll allow you to touch them and eventually you start you know fondling there their legs and Tails and ran hoping to get them to ejaculate and had a volunteer working with me her name was fav agree Gionee she worked with him every other day or so for a few months and was never successful we were

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are really starting to get kind of desperate about options and James says in a way it was a paradox because on the one hand awesome we have an actual living Pinta Island tortoise but on the other hand he might have actually been like the worst possible candidate for last of his kind she seemed to really like to keep to himself he never really liked other tortoises much he didn't seem to like humans and maybe that's why he survived he wasn't curious James says a lot of tortoises hear your footsteps they raise their heads they

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they come out to see what's going on and then they get whacked yeah

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in any case for about 40 years scientists tried everything humanly possible to get Lonesome George to mate with another tortoise so they could resurrect the species and bring Pinta Island back to its original state nothing worked

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until one day in July 2008 George turns to the two female tortoises that he had been ignoring for years and he says inexplicably he just suddenly decides to mate with both of them they each lay eggs two clutches were ultimately laid in his Corral and the scientists are like George got our hopes up

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dramatically but they ultimately were infertile

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mother

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mid 80s they were having a meeting about this that's conservationist Josh Tomlin again whole bunch of herpetologist were out there and some Island conservationists and they're talking about what to do Pinta and they can't get Lonesome George to reproduce which are hoping to do because then they could build a pint of population and put it on Pinta and he says as a meeting war on it got tense for sure in fact one guy spoke with very green I'm a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University said that at this meeting there was one guy who just couldn't take it oh I remember

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Tim just fuming ESET they're getting more and more and more frustrated than finally just blurt it out shoot that tortoise and quit wasting our time because in his view this the single individual was holding up this huge conservation opportunity and of course the shock was there was a way went around the room when he said that I recall seeing serve a second wave as a Spanish translation

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Ian passed around the room really what that guy was specifically saying was don't be precious tortoise is a tortoise is a tortoise let's just take some tortoises from a nearby Island and put them back on Pinta but there's a much bigger question here that goes Way Beyond Club

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which is basically like what is the right way to protect nature now people are right now throwing beers at each other around what is the right strategy Josh says that there are basically two camps right now on the one side you've got this classic like what you might call the Eden approach conservation biology its foundation is this idea of pristine Wilderness from the very beginning I think all of us well I can't speak for other people but but you always

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I have this idea of wanting to get it back to some kind of pre Human Condition real human being the operative word and if you think about it we all have this we all have this this picture of what we want to bring it all back to you know it might be like the planes just covered with Buffalo or maybe the Serengeti desert with lions and elephants or maybe it's 10,000 hammerhead sharks but whatever the scene is that just doesn't have any people but his

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carrying that idea those pictures in your head even like useful anymore it's like so Sanic know but it just seems so unrealistic right but I mean in the bigger picture you can make the argument that humans now affect every square meter of the earth there's no place no matter how remote we get you can go to the North Pole it's been affected by human activity you can go I don't know the depths of the impenetrable jungle it's been affected by human activity that's how they dream is

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she's an environmental law professor at the Berkeley school of law in California we are radically remaking the world and the question is what's our responsibility this brings us to our second school of thought which in its most extreme version goes something like this we're God we might as well get good at it and we're going to have to create these ecosystems based on our best science and you could argue we're going to have to get a whole lot better

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better at making some very very difficult decisions climate change seems to mean that a lot of species are pretty much doomed 30% 40% 50% of the species now on the planet in a few decades may be disappearing in this is what I think is really the tough question now is if we concede that we can't any longer save all the

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she's then does that put us in the situation of having to decide which ones will save and which ones we want and do we have any basis for making those kinds of decisions hmm so you saying that the quota let's go back to when it was good let's go back to a better time that's just silly I didn't say it was silly okay what I said it was impossible things might not be silly they might not be stupid ideas but

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we still might not be able to do them

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okay so here's a wood plaque that says Lonesome George is the last survivor of the dynasty of land tortoises from Pinta Island and in fact in 2012 after Decades of trying to get him to debride

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Lonesome George dies R.I.P 24th of June 2012 and the pinna tortoise went extinct so damn case in point I guess no going back yeah I mean that's what I thought but then I spoke with this woman hello hello just how do you hear me yes I do who kind of scrambled everything up for me can I get you to introduce yourself yes my name is Giselle a Kakuna I am a senior research scientist are you

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University and Giselle has come up with kind of a radical idea I call it the Phoenix project here's the backstory in the mid-90s we start the day 94 Gisela and some folks from the Galapagos National Park they began taking a census of all the tortoises in the Galapagos every population of tortoises on all the islands you're going to do this big population studies so they went Island by Island took a little bit of blood from all these different tortoises did a genetic analysis and apply found something they never expected a group of tour

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Lisa's not on Pinta that had a lot of Pinta DNA I remember very clearly that moment was very very exciting it's like yes look at this we're seeing this Pinta DNA was on another Island yeah no none Pinta know how would that happen we don't think it was natural Gisela thinks it might have been the Whalers made their the Whalers or the Pirates you know because like we talked about in the 17 1800 s these Whalers would come along grab a bunch of

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Curtis has put them on the ship and then they would hunt for whales or two below and sometimes when they were done and if the ship was filled with whale products there's no room down here he throw a few extra tortoises overboard say a few from Pinta maybe those pins tortoises swim with the currents to that nearby Island set up a little expat community

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and started breeding with the local that's our working hypothesis which brings us to her idea you know on average 50% of your genome comes from your mom and 50% from your dad but it's an average so just tell the thought just by chance some of these tortoises are going to have a little bit more Pinta DNA from their Pinta ancestors than others yes so what if we took those tortoises and read them together correct them for the Next Generation so you

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give a push to the third this process she says if we keep doing that taking the babies with the most painted DNA breeding them together slowly surely in for Generations you could have 90% of the Pinta genome restored really yeah but that's four generations of tortoises not rats which means at least a hundred years but

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in the meantime the vegetation on Pinta is growing out of control from an ecological point of view Pinta can't wait so in 2009 they come up with a stopgap they take 39 tortoises raised in captivity and they use them as Place holders they sterilize them and put them on Pinta really well yeah these are very purest sort of Visions they've got yeah they sterilize them 39 of them so they're just basically the lawn mowers they're not exactly and they put them on Pinta and they're just

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chomping away right now they're living at their lives really happily on Pinta

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you know until the originals are ready

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now Linda says in the end you don't actually need to do the full aggressive for Generation breeding thing you can just take the best Pinta ish tortoises you find and put those on Pinta and you know over the next two hundred thousand years

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they will evolve into a paint a tortoise and it could be a bit different than the past Pinta tortoise because Evolution and mutation and all that doesn't occur the same

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but eventually Nature's going to take over

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and they will evolve into Penta tortoises

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is this the way that everybody who works in the tortoises thinks about it this kind of deep time I don't know I'm not sure many other people think about that

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just walk past the newspaper that says 72 hours left in the Electoral campaign

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and the flags are still flying everywhere

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we'll be back in less than 200,000 years yeah but we will be different when we come back and we will stay tuned hi this is Emily calling from rainy Vancouver Washington Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation enhancing public understanding of Science and Technology in the modern world more information about Sloane at www.tsiyon.org watch

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I'm Jana boom Rod I'm Robert krulwich this is Radiolab today a whole hour on the Galapagos Islands the place that inspired Charles Darwin to create his theory of evolution whose basic ingredients are lots of time isolation and then constant change but Darwin didn't consider this possibility what if on these islands thousands of tourists arrive every day carrying fruits and chocolates and souvenirs jumping from Island to Island now the Galapagos government spends Millions

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millions of dollars checking all of the goods that come in and out trying to quarantine the ones that might have things that are a problem but what if simply putting your foot on the ground can completely transform a place

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eleven activity sir Tim Howard so I met this woman named Hank Yeager who is like a plant scientist I'm their restoration ecologist at the Charles Darwin Foundation here we are in Los Angeles we were going to look at these incredible craters called Los gemelos I almost got hit by a car and as we're walking along the path C she's like oh wait look at this she points just to the right of the path look at this species here small leave

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green thing they call it Yankton and Spanish it is in its plantar go I think in the u.s. they call it was it the wrench of the white man the wrench of the white man it's actually the footprint of the white man doesn't matter point is an introduced species it's introduced found in Europe North Africa shouldn't be here and you have this one here points right next to it called Titus can Thea Sharpie thing

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NG green and white leaves it has a terrible common name in English I'm not going to say it Wandering Jew basic houseplant you can buy it at Home Depot but there it is in the Galapagos and along this path just looking to the right and the left and then Jesus starts counting the number of invasive species at 1 2 3 4 as you can see here it's only right next to the trail but not so much further and you see that they're only there for this border of about 5 to 10 inches along the edge of that path

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why why would that be because I think he said what happens is it Taurus they'll be back in their home country they'll be walking around in Garden or park and it'll be filled with tiny seeds the seeds sticked to shoes and socks and trousers they wear those trousers on the plane and then they wear them when they come here and then people walk and then just distribute or disperse the seats along the trail wow now most of these plants are actually probably harmless and you know like you said Galapagos National Park

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they spend tons of money tons of time trying to keep invasives out but fact is there's only so much you can do and every once in a while one of these hitchhikers slips under the radar and just wreaks Havoc

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you just grabbed it just like that you just put your hands around yeah but that's only possible the first day so while we were in the highlands of Santa Cruz hunky took me through the woods to meet this guy named Arnold my name is Anna chimbure Adam is an ornithologist from the University of Vienna and shortly after we walked up he reached out into this tree and he grabbed this tiny little baby Finch right off the branch he's adorable he's oh my God he said he

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he looks a little bit furry almost really tiny vulnerable Fletchling of a wobbler finch Stir the Water Finch is the smallest of the Darwin's finches you can like see him pulsing kind of acid breathing so Darwin's finches in short Darwin when he visited Galapagos he collected a lot of specimens of finches took them back to England and eventually he realized that the beaks had all adapted they were a little bit different depending on which island the finches lived on with a beaks

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beaks adapt to whatever the for they were eating one Islands finches had literally like the beak would be shaped sort of long and then the next Island it would look almost the same but much shorter and this became one of the one of the most important pieces of evidence that you know when animals would move from one place to another they would begin to differentiate based on Mustang these are very very important Peaks but speaking of Beaks that Finch that are no was holding just a friend

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in his beak did you see the 50 decide is extremely huge the nostrils have have big holes something had gotten inside this little finches nostrils drilled these holes and it was now eating the Flesh on the inside of the birds nostrils scientists first began to see this in 1997 when they started to find nests full of dead baby finches at first nobody had

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no idea what kind of creature it was so they began to frantically study it

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I actually visited one of the main researchers PA dawdling Congo aqui tenemos El laboratorio she's lived in Galapagos for over a decade and she showed me her lab I'm surrounded by shelves and on the shelves are these tiny little plastic cups that are filled with flies this is the villain

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but but a solo called cared about the most a little black fly looks like every other flies is a palace is ill me more Grupo de la música domestic in fact P dot says is a llama for media that it's actually in the same family as the regular house fly but it's actually a botfly called the Lorna's downsy you just spell full Earnest downsy yeah it's Phi L I can't spell out loud Phil or Lor and is

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View and Si okay file honest actually means bird loving that's Charlotte costin she's a researcher at the Charles Darwin Foundation she says there's actually very little known about the fly they're not sure where it came from her quite how it got here but here's what they do know the adult fly seems to be harmless we had a fly is actually vegetarian it feeds on flowers and we think decomposing fruits baby flies they are not vegetarian that will you know

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no suck blood and what happens is that as soon as Bird start laying eggs mother flies will bin and lay their eggs on the base of the nest sort of underneath the Finch eggs once the eggs hatch

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the eggs hatch of the Flies as well and the larvae wriggling little larvae will crawl out from the bottom of the nest of the finches body into its beak and they go into the noses and the baby finches and just start eating you know they're basically feed on the blood of the baby birds how did these little fly babies no that's a that's a very specific trip to take it question we're still

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time to figure that out you know we assume that it was carbon dioxide carbon dioxide from the breathing of the birds yeah opening a box with some of the birds the little being so honest the finches oh God it's a noise normal piedad showed me this this tiny little dead Finch in this box D well at the college in a cerebro see

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wow there's a little hole into the brain of this little Finch oh my God what go in there and I spotted a they eat the whole back of this little Finch

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it's a how big a problem is this well I talked to one scientist so in your client or fur I'm professor in animal behavior at Flinders University South Australia and she told me that researchers recently did a survey of Finch nests for different species on two islands and all research groups found about 95 percent mortality in the nest

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ninety-five percent of the babies were dead yeah and our no told me that this year a small tree finches so far we had only to nest with fletchling's and all the others were dead so it's a lot but even worse so far we found file honest on 13 Islands the Flies spreading Island to island is there any time scale be should worry about like are these finches disappearing very fast very slowly depends on the species we have at least five

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species that are known to be facing extinction and another six in serious decline these five species does that mean that they may go extinct in the next five years in the next 50 years I hope not but you know we have the case of the mangrove Finch we have 60 to 80 individuals left wow it's a Race Against Time

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so for starters they put up all these trousers and a mahaki assume that company they took me outside the show me where the traps are trap hanging from a tree here and you see them actually all over Santa Cruz he's bright yellow traps hanging from trees animals and this is to control the fly population now there with names like millions of traps every few feet to do that this is just to grab a few flies take them back to the lab and study them so they can learn how to fight them Charlotte and paid ads fantasy is that the Flies use a pheromone

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to attract the opposite sex see the yeah fantastic it would be lovely if we could find something like that because if they could find that chemical that love chemical that the Flies used to attract each other they could disrupt it confuse the Flies and screw up their mating another possibility is sterile insect technique sterilized male flies and introduce them back into the wild the female mates with Astera fly and obviously it doesn't produce fertile eggs if they can't make babies a

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relation will crash and in some cases you can successfully eradicate a species this is very much like the mosquitoes very much Kenny talked about a couple podcasts ago right but here's the problem is this once when you a lot of plastic at the name us if they're gonna release sterilized male flies into the wild they have to be able to raise soon demille's inclusive the millions and millions of these fights in the lab is the cast Munna Umbra and they're trying like crazy showing me all of the larvas that hatch today and a Dodge

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me for baby flies at had just hatched and they're in these little cups E1 through India this tenido but she told me that these four flies will probably die because they always die right now we have huge problems trying to reify Darkness and captivity which is ironic given you know how abundant it is in the wild so long ago created as individuals adult dose when I was there be a dad told me that so far they had only successfully raised three

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three adult flies

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when you're saying they needed Millions yeah and meanwhile the fish populations are just getting decimated Charlotte says that they're trying to respond ornithologist have started to notice some new behaviors for instance add up but it's picking the Lavi out of the nostrils of the baby birds and what we're starting to see is that they're beginning to consume them you mean eat the fly larva yeah which 15 years ago they would never do back in the year 2000 sounion some colleagues tried feeding the finches some fly

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Ava and if ever there were a look of disgust on a finch face that was it so I think there's been a change they're also seeing baby finches climbing up over each other just struggling to get away from the larvae on the bottom of the nest I'm and they'll even start standing on the nest Rim just to avoid being eaten but when I asked Charlotte what she makes of all of these changes she said I think probably too little too late

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but then Sonia told me something really surprising yeah that that was a very unexpected Discovery takes a couple steps to get there but just to set it up back in 2000 she was on floreana island for the first time I started studying Darwin's finches in particular three tree Finch species the small the medium and the large and we went out and we set up our Mist Nets and we caught the birds and we measured them and the

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to know is that even though these are our three different species they're actually really hard to tell apart visually so she would end up relying on their songs their mating calls yep do you remember the song types could you whistle them for me oh yes it's a very simple song the small tree Finch goes something like chicha

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that's a small tree Finch and the medium tree Finch is just a bit slower for the medium is a to for the large g g t-- t-- wow it's like a soprano saxophone and an alto and tenor something like that that's right so we just you know sat in the forest and we're and we would always quiz each other what's that what's that we all agreed because the calls are really distinct easier to tell apart but the

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thing was from year to year it got more difficult so he says each time she go into the field the song sounded like they were starting to blur together

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then when I showed up after a few years again I was truly even more perplexed here are dad why can't I tell these finches apart it's it was very confusing am I losing my touch but that shouldn't really happen you should actually get better with experience yeah not worse and that's where I thought oh something's changed in the system

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I'd like to think of it as a kind of Darwin Finch you know sleuthing Adventure so Sonia your team rounded up some of the birds they tagged we collected genetic samples got some DNA and song samples made some recordings yep brought all this stuff into the lab analyzed the genetic samples and and had this terrible realization that the large tree Finch is now extinct totally gone from the island so you're really only had to spend

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she's like you had the small tree finches and the medium tree finches and based on that genetic data the small tree finches not doing great but compared to the medium tree finches they are because the medium tree finches were on the brink of Extinction like a large ones yeah but then she sees something amazing in that genetic data she sees a small group of birds who have mixed up jeans hybrid cluster some jeans

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from the small tree finches and some from The Medium tree finches what does that mean well it means that these two different finches had started having babies together which should never actually happen because these are totally separate species that's really the classical definition of a species is like a biological rule about who you're not going to make a baby with so they choose not to breed even if they could for who knows maybe a million years the medium tree Finch has patrolled that boundary I've got my thing over here

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you got your thing over there but then Along come the Flies and all of a sudden like over a maybe 20 years these medium tree finge's they start to break their own biggest Rule and they start to mate outside of their own kind and these hybrid finches are they doing better against flies well there's there's a couple clues that say maybe yeah for example when you look in the nests they seem to have fewer parasites and they seem to have more

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or babies that survive 15% wow whereas the numbers were very small for the medium tree Finch and smaller for the small tree Finch wow I daresay that sounds kind of hopeful it does yeah now the jury is still very much out on what will happen but if the hybrids do have a fitness advantage and if they survive we may be witnessing in Hyper Speed the creation of an entirely new species it would possibly be one of the first

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vertebrate examples of speciation in real time that we can observe

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so talked into the story of these finches

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is the story of Galapagos

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same exact story that Darwin saw these processes that he described the just never ever stop it's this unending struggle

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one last thing my last night there I went to meet up with that guy Leonidas who is running for mayor I met him at this pizza place the election had happened the night before and did he win no buchelli the incumbent one so we go outside Chad Taylor Nia parallel paralysis I was running as a mayor turns out he speak some English so we you know we do this interview in English and I'm almost embarrassed that I wanted to talk to him because I think that dude

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it's just going to be so down and out exactly the opposite he was so joyful to have lost that's what I thought you're not sad you're not sad I'm no never friend and he's like friend this is a field of for the other three of money behind them and you see their flags all over Santa Cruz I just came in second wow the guy who wins he spent $500,000 I spent what two grand friend is the beginning is the beginning of a new

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a new future for the Galapagos Island

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we are ascended and we keep we have our dreams up so Nature has a boy is now the sea lion has a boys in us the tortoises as a boys enough the Penguin and everyone so something is happening that's exactly how he sees it so thank you very much for the interview I hope you enjoyed the Galapagos Islands

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producer Tim hour before we close very special thanks to Matthew Judas kielty without him Tim would have been crushed just by the sheer amount of tape that he gathered did also thanks to Dylan key for original music thanks to Tricia Tillman and Screen siren pictures Alex galavant Matthias Espinoza the naturals guide from the first chapter who wrote this song Peak opens on he's also a well-known musician in Galapagos turns out thanks to the Galapagos National

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Mark Charles Darwin Foundation Island conservation and the Galapagos Conservancy I'm Jana boom Rod I Robert krulwich thanks for listening hi this is James Gibbs calling from Syracuse New York my name is Charlotte cross deny this is so declined or from Flinders University and I have been asked to leave a message for the credit Radiolab is produced by WNYC distributed by NPR and distributed by NPR Radio Lab is produced by Jed a perm rod our staff

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cludes and in hon CERN we let him Howard Bern a pharaoh Molly Webster Melissa O'Donnell selling case Jamie your Lynn Levi and the Mills and Kelsey Padgett with help from Harry and whack Matt kielty Burgers & goo & Lily Sullivan special thanks to Kate Hopkins Henry Nichols Jason kobler Carol Ann Bassett Robert Lamm and Tricia Tillman hope that that was good enough okay I hope that was okay thanks that's it