Galápagos Islands

The Galápagos Islands, long acknowledged as Darwin’s “Living Laboratory,” are one of the world’s most important ecological treasures. From their discovery in 1535 until the creation of the Galápagos National Park in 1959, human hands touched lightly on their shores. Seemingly incapable of sustaining colonization because of poor soil, a scarcity of water, and no mineral wealth, the absence of humans allowed the native species of the Galápagos to remain undisturbed until whalers in the 1790s found that the lumbering Galápagos tortoises could be stored for months in their ship’s holds as a source of fresh meat. In 1832 Ecuador took possession of the archipelago but its colonization efforts generally failed. Although human settlement remained minimal, mammals that people brought (goats, donkeys, pigs, dogs, and cats) flourished and diminished the numbers of the endemic species. When the Galápagos National Park opened, only about 2,000 people lived on the islands along with the remaining endemic species and hundreds of thousands of feral animals. Meanwhile, naturalist Charles Darwin’s remarkable 1859 study, On the Origins of Species had stimulated biologists’ interest in the islands’ wildlife by presenting overwhelming proof of evolution. Other biologists questioned his idea of natural selection as the mechanism behind evolution; consequently they gathered evidence from collected specimens and observations in the archipelago, and finally resolved the debate in Darwin’s favor. After 1990, popular interest in the islands’ wildlife heightened as a result of photography, travelers’ accounts, and films, so tourism increased as did the number of Ecuadorian immigrants eager to earn money in the tourist industry. By 2020, Ecuadorian authorities faced the dilemma of balancing the need to preserve the unique species and their fragile environment against the revenue generated by visitors, a battle environmentalists fear the government is losing.