They find a tortoise in Galapagos that was believed to be extinct more than a hundred years ago
Ecuador At least 39 giant tortoises return to the Galapagos Islands
For more than a century her species was considered extinct, but
Fernanda, the only known Fernandina giant tortoise
in the world, lives and there could be more like her, hidden in one of the Galapagos Islands (Ecuador), where a scientific expedition will leave to try to find them.
Scientists from the Galapagos Conservancy organization and the Galapagos National Park guard hope to reach
the uninhabited and wild Fernandina Island,
the third largest in the archipelago, which is located about a thousand kilometers from the continental coasts of Ecuador.
If the weather permits, the experts will leave for Fernandina at the end of the year full of optimism, since they have "evidence that suggests that at least between one and three more tortoises are still on the island,"
Washington Tapia
told Efe. , director of the Galapagos Conservancy.
"We have found footprints, clearly of a turtle's foot, not very old feces, in places very different from where we found Fernanda," he detailed in reference to the
turtle found in 2019
.
Yale University, in the United States, carried out genetic studies and the respective comparison of the DNA with
another specimen extracted from that same island in 1906
, for which it was determined that Fernanda belongs to the species "Chelonoidis phantasticus", the Fernandina giant tortoise. .
FIND BY CHANCE
Fernanda's discovery occurred, "somehow, by chance," says Tapia, commenting that on the last day of the 2019 expedition and, after several hours of
"kilometers of horrible lava,"
they reached an area where vegetation could be seen.
There they found old turtle feces, a "bed" where a turtle had slept, and finally the park
ranger Jeffreys Málaga
saw Fernanda, a quelonian "probably 80, 100 years old, maybe more," says Tapia.
He presumes that the tortoise was locked up in that area from a very young age, and that the lack of food affected its development, since it weighed
18.4 of the approximately 30 kilos
that correspond to an adult saddle-type female, and measured 54.3 centimeters in length. , when the expected ranges between 60 and 65.
Under special care in Santa Cruz, Fernanda now weighs almost 28 kilos and
has grown about three millimeters
.
She is "very healthy",
"she does not like people very much",
and is isolated in a security pen without access to the public, where she receives food and water, although not daily, she indicates.
This is because the Galapagos National Park Breeding Center is a conservation tool and not a zoo, so they offer tortoises the most natural conditions possible so that they do not lose the ability to search for their own food.
"The plan
is not for them to remain in captivity for life
," he stresses.
PIRATES, WHALEMEN AND OIL
Lola Villacreses
, a naturalist guide in the Galapagos for 22 years, has assured Efe that there are now some 50,000 dome-type and saddle-type tortoises in the entire archipelago, where before there were some 350,000.
"The Spanish galleons came here to take refuge because they were being chased by pirate ships, and to stock up on food" -including turtles- and then corsairs and whalers arrived, who also
had turtles in their diet
, he explains.
The human being introduced different animals, including dogs, which attacked the turtles, also affected "by the massacre at the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s to
extract their oil for public lighting in Guayaquil and Quito
," he adds. Wall.
Pirates and whalers moved between islands, so it is possible that they
have moved turtles to other places
, and therefore, only genetic studies will determine the species of turtles that they eventually find in Fernandina.
"A NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK"
In the expeditions you have to sleep in tents and "walk in a giant lava field," says Villacreses, while Tapia comments that looking for "animals scattered
over more than 600 kilometers
of rugged surface is like looking for a needle in a haystack or a chip of telephone in a very large park".
Each expedition lasts ten days (two of travel and eight of work), includes the participation of
between twenty and thirty people
, and costs around 60,000 dollars (about 60,202 euros at current exchange rates), but at the end of the year the value is will double, since they will use a helicopter for the transfers.
With slopes of up to 70 degrees, most of the island is covered in lava, in many cases sharp: "Sometimes crossing a kilometer-long lava flow can take us
three hours and a pair of
typical 'trekking' boots.
' (hiking) lasts us a single day," he says.
"Now the priority is to find more tortoises,
we cross our fingers that some of them are male
," says Tapia, hoping that Fernanda can reproduce and prolong the existence of the species.
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