Far out

Darwin’s Playground

The Galápagos Islands have 250 animal species that exist nowhere else in the world—and a boat trip with just a few folks and a guide is the way to see some of them. Don’t mind the guano. Photography by Christine Ennulat

10/14/09 9:05 AM

Do you like this?

Standing on the tarmac of the Baltra Island airport, I stared. The modern-looking terminal, built on the remains of an American WWII outpost, was incongruous amid the barren, red-clay landscape dotted only with strange tree cacti and naked, gray shrubs. “Nice,” I thought. In the little reading I’d been able to squeeze in before the trip, I’d learned that the Galápagos were not exactly verdant, but this was downright bleak.

Darwin's Playground

I needn’t have worried.

A naturalist guide would soon meet us at the airport, then take us to the 84-foot yacht, the Sea Cloud, where we would stay for the next eight days—my father, my sister and me, with four other passengers and a few crew members. My father had gotten inspired to go to the Galápagos after seeing my sister’s enormous coffee table book on the subject, and he wanted his two “caretakers”—sister Daniela and me—along with him. So, once we found a mutually acceptable date, he began to arrange everything.

Before we left for the islands last July, I loved telling people I was going. For a while afterward, it was hard to talk about. Words were too small.

Six-hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador along the juncture of the Nazca and Cocos tectonic plates, the Galápagos are 13 islands of six square miles or larger, six smaller ones and a few dozen rocks and islets. Their appearance is relatively recent, geologically speaking—the archipelago was uplifted from the ocean floor thanks to what’s known as a “hot spot,” where magma pushes up into the earth’s mantle and occasionally squirts through. All the species there, from giant tortoise to marine iguana to blue-footed booby to penguin, arrived from somewhere else, whether by air or by sea, landing where three ocean currents converge: the cold and nutrient-rich Humboldt, up from the Antarctic and predominating from June through November (it brought penguins and fur seals to the islands); the westward-flowing, warmer Panama current, which takes the Humboldt’s place from January to May; and, every few years, the warm, nutrient-poor El Niño, which pushes away the bounty of the Humboldt and sometimes causes devastating population crashes among some species.

The landscape is so inhospitable that many of the castaways had to become something else in order to survive. The islands harbor more than 600 native species (compared to the mainland’s 20,000), and 250 of those are endemic—meaning they exist nowhere else in the world, having diverged so much that they can no longer be classified as related to their original ancestors. From a single finch ancestor, we now have the 13 species of what are known as Darwin’s finches. A couple are tool users—think cactus spine as fork. One is a vampire.