Located on the southeast side of the island of San Cristóbal near Puerto Chino, La Galapaguera de Cerro Colorado is a tortoise reserve that was built to improve the status of the of the island’s tortoise population, the Chatham Island Tortoise (Chelonoidis chatamensis).
| Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.  |
| Rainy Shipwreck Bay Puerto Moreno, San Cristóbal, Galápagos |
Wet and Dry Landing
Our journey to the Galapaguera began with what was supposed to be a dry landing that turned out to be both wet and dry. The boat docked beyond Punta Carola in the Canal de Santa Fé and we could see shallow rain clouds coming off of Cerro San Joaquin. The port is far too shallow for anything but small fishing boats or catamarans. On the 2 mile zodiac ride into the Shipwreck Bay piers we got drenched. More rain fell as we boarded a bus for the 40 minute drive across the island to Puerto Chino. By the time we got to Galapaguera de Cerro Colorado it had stopped raining but it was still painfully hot and humid, and we were all soggy.
The drive across the island took us through the little town of El Progreso and up into the hills (cerros) to the end of the road at the Galapaguera. It would not be hard to find this place as there are so few roads but I have no idea what it would be like trying to rent a car in this place. To best describe San Cristóbal: It is primitive. There was not one home we saw that was completed or painted. Mostly tin roof houses. It looked something like photos of the American South in the 1940s.
The roads are rough, everything is very third world. Lovely. But poorly or undeveloped. While we awaited other passengers to get on the bus which was parked a few blocks inland from the piers we saw a group of school children being led with hands over eyes through the streets. We thought they must be participating in a tsunami drill. We were wrong. Raw sewage was flowing through the streets with the rains. The kids were being shielded the sight of the sewage. Not so the tourists.
At Cerro Colorado the tortoises live in a semi-natural habitat where they can be observed and tourists learn about their origin, evolution, and threats to the species. Here they are protected through maturity, separated into pens with different age groups of tortoises. The eldest tortoises roam semi-free in the preserve.
| Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.  |
| Bryopteris filicina, a liverwort, adornes Scalesia trees in the humid highlands of San Cristóbal The presence of abundant liverworts and low hanging Scalesia give the Cerro Colorado forest a kind of primeval feel |
The Galápagos are located in the Pacific Dry Belt, and in average years only the highest altitudes of the larger islands receiving enough rainfall to support tropical plant life. The humid highlands, where the Galapaguera is located, are lush and green. In this zone Scalesia trees form a very dense forest, with their branches adorned with mosses, liverworts, and epiphytes—non-parasitic plants that use larger trees only for support. Here the tortoises would naturally find ample food.
These tortoises were heavily exploited and completely eliminated over much of their original range. Trampling of nests by feral donkeys, and the predation of young by feral dogs decimated populations, but the breeding program has led to successful releases and there are now thought to be about 6,700 individuals.
Follow Phillip
on instagram
C. chatamensis has a wide, black shell, its shape intermediate between the saddlebacked and domed species: adult males are rather saddlebacked, but females and young males are wider in the middle and more domed. A now extinct, more flat-shelled form occurred throughout the wetter and higher regions of the island most altered by man when the island was colonized. The type specimen was from this extinct population, so it is possible that the species currently designated C. chathamensis may be mistakenly applied.
These giant tortoises once thrived on most of the world’s continents but now the Galápagos tortoise represents one of the two remaining groups of giant tortoises in the world (the other being the Aldabra Giant Tortoise (Aldabrachelys gigantea) found in the Seychelles).
The giant tortoise population in the Galápagos archipelago was once so large that the islands were supposedly named for these huge reptiles, though that point is often debated by Galápagos guides; the old Spanish word galapago meant saddle and was used by early explorers for the tortoises due to the shape of their shells.
Tortoise numbers in the Galápagos archipelago declined from over 250,000 in the 16th century to around 3,000 in the 1970s and only ten of the original fifteen subspecies survive in the wild.
On the island of San Cristóbal there were originally two populations of tortoises; one in the northeast, which remains to this day and currently consists of around 1,400 individuals, and another in the south of the island that became extinct due to the exploitation of the species for meat and oil and the introduction of non-native predators to the islands (such as goats, rats and pigs).
Despite ongoing efforts to eradicate the non-native predators, it became necessary to protect the tortoises. Individuals from the northeast population were transferred to Cerro Colorado. The reserve now runs a program to breed the tortoises in captivity before releasing them back into the wild on their ancestral home lands.
San Cristóbal tortoises mate once per year and lay between 12 and 16 eggs. The eggs are collected by park rangers and put in a dark box for 30 days and then incubated. The hatchlings are transferred to growing pens, where they remain for two years before being transported to their natural environment.
Breeding Laboratory
We were unfortunately rushed through the breeding laboratory where young tortoises are housed. We did have time to make a few photographs of the tiny giant tortoises. The rush was to squeeze countless tourists through the facility as quickly as possible. Logistics and planning are often lacking in the Galápagos.
Each turtle is numbered with different colored paint as it ages. Here #17 and #18, 2-year-olds, have a meal of chopped taro leaves.
The tortoises at La Galapaguera live in semi-natural conditions and visitors may follow interpretive trails through the reserve and see the young tortoises in the breeding pens.
These herbivores spend their days grazing on grass, leaves and cactus, basking in the sun and napping for nearly 16 hours per day. A slow metabolism and large internal stores of water mean they can survive up to a year without eating or drinking.
We found the interpretive tours to be long on folksy stories about various species of plants and short on tortoise time. When we got to the tortoise pens we were quickly moved from place to place in the breeding area giving us barely enough time to snap a few photos. There were quite a few larger tortoises wandering through the forest that we caught glimpses of and a few that were hanging out on the main pathways.
The visitors centre also offers talks on the natural history of giant tortoises and the relationship and differences between the tortoises of San Cristóbal and the other tortoises in the archipelago.
There is a great amount of variation in size and shape among the Galápagos tortoises, however two main morphological forms exist; The domed carapace, which is most similar to their ancestral form, and the saddle-backed carapace.
The domed tortoises tend to be much larger and are generally found on higher and more humid islands, while the smaller saddle-backed tortoises evolved on arid islands as a response to the lack of available food during drought.
The San Cristóbal tortoise’s shape is between both species with males having a saddle-backed shape and females and young males being wider in the middle and more domed in shape.
Next we visit the tortoise reserves on Santa Cruz and compare and contrast the experiences.
Next we visit the tortoise reserves on Santa Cruz and compare and contrast the experiences.
In the Arctic Ocean, some ice stays frozen year-round, lasting for many years before melting. But this winter, the region hit a record low for ice older than five years.
This, along witha near-record low for sea ice over all, supports predictions that by midcentury there will be no more ice in the Arctic Ocean in summer.
As darker, heat-absorbing water replaces reflective ice, it hastens warming in the region. Older ice is generally thicker than newer ice and thus more resilient to heat. But as the old ice disappears, the newer ice left behind is more vulnerable to rising temperatures.
“First-year ice grows through winter and then to up to a maximum, which is usually around in March,” said Mark A. Tschudi, a research associate at the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “As summer onsets, the ice starts to melt back.”
Some of the new ice melts each summer, but some of it lingers to grow thicker over the following winter, forming second-year ice. The next summer, some of that second-year ice survives, then grows even thicker and more resilient the next winter, creating what is known as multiyear ice. Some ice used to last more than a decade.
Today, Arctic sea ice is mostly first-year ice. While the oldest ice has always melted when currents pushed it south into warmer waters, now more of the multiyear ice is melting within the Arctic Ocean, leaving more open water in its wake.
This is especially bad for animals like narwhals, the so-called unicorns of the sea, that use sea ice to avoid predators like killer whales. As the sea ice disappears, killer whales spend more time in narwhal waters, eating the narwhals and driving them from the richest feeding grounds.
“I’ve been on record saying that it may be 2030 that we could see a seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean,” said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center. “Some people have said that that’s too aggressive, that we’re looking at maybe sometime in the 2040s. But we are definitely on track to lose that summer sea ice cover. Honestly, I don’t think there’s any going back at this point.”