Lonesome George and the Battle for Galapagos

Lonesome George is the most famous tortoise in the world.

He is also the only one of his kind.

His ancestors were slaughtered over a century ago.

Discovered and rescued in the '70s,

he's come to symbolise the plight of the unique animals of the Galapagos

and the battle to restore the islands to their former glory.

For a while, Galapagos was considered beyond saving.

Decades of conservation work

succeeded in buying time, but the wildlife is once again under attack.

Tensions between local people and wildlife run high.

The islands have been brought to the point of crisis.

But those same people may offer the islands their best chance of salvation.

Extreme measures are being taken.

In 21st-century Galapagos,

can its unique wildlife be spared the same fate as Lonesome George -

staring extinction in the face?

The famous Galapagos islands.

A tropical paradise - remote,

fantastical and renowned for their abundance of wildlife.

The islands take their name from the Spanish word for giant tortoise -

this is one of only two places on Earth these reptiles are found.

They're a naturalist's dream -

the most pristine tropical archipelago in the world.

Flung far off the west coast of South America, the Galapagos Islands

are isolated by hundreds of miles of ocean in every direction.

This isolation has led to the evolution of so many unique species,

and that same isolation

has protected them from human colonisation and disturbance.

But the islands are changing.

30,000 people now call these islands home.

They're mostly immigrants from mainland Ecuador.

Galapagos is a province of Ecuador,

and the people retain a strong national identity.

The vast majority have arrived in the past 20 years.

The islands are famous for the tameness of their animals.

Here, more than anywhere else on Earth, humans and wildlife

appear to live happily side by side.

In this pristine wilderness of Galapagos

you can almost believe that you are in a modern-day Garden of Eden.

But in reality, this trusting wildlife is particularly vulnerable.

Despite the illusion of paradise, the animals have been suffering

for as long as people have been present here.

There's no better case in point than the story of Lonesome George.

On the outskirts of town, Lonesome George has his own corral

within the protective boundaries of the National Park

and Charles Darwin Research Centre.

Fausto Llerena is the chief warden

responsible for Lonesome's comfort and well-being.

He's grown fond of his precious charge.

He is unique.

He's in the Guinness Book of Records as the loneliest creature on Earth.

He is, quite simply, the only surviving member of his race.

The only Pinta Island giant tortoise in existence.

The rest of his kind were mostly wiped out by whalers and buccaneers

in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Ships full of hungry men, at sea for months on end.

They had this problem of victualling,

and they got to the Galapagos and they would look forward to it

for weeks because that's where they could get tortoises.

If you've come round Cape Horn

and you've been living off mummified penguins and rotten pork for months,

and you've got the chance of stocking up your ship with several tonnes

of absolutely fresh living meat,

by dumping a few hundred tortoises in the holds,

the quality of life for you increases

a great deal, although it reduces a lot for the poor animals in the hold.

It's thought that Galapagos had 13 races of giant tortoises,

spread across the larger islands of the archipelago.

It was the outlying island populations

that were first plundered by the visiting sailors.

The first race to go extinct, as far as we can tell, was on Floreana,

where the noteworthy Mr Charles Darwin visited in the 1830s -

he was there in the closing stages of the existence of that tortoise.

By 1840, as far as we can tell, it was gone.

In fact, Darwin may have eaten some of the very last ones, and the shells

were thrown overboard from the Beagle as they sailed off,

so it was a different ethic in those days. You had to survive.

Nearly all the populations were decimated by the visiting sailors.

At least two races were considered extinct by the mid 20th century.

While the tortoises of Pinta Island

were known only from skeletons and a 19th-century lithograph.

The Pinta tortoise always fascinated me personally,

because he was such a weird-looking animal. And, as you can see,

it just doesn't look like other tortoises.

It's just taller and the texture of the shell is completely different.

And, it struck me as, "Hey, I've seen giant tortoises in London Zoo,

"but there's nothing like that."

You can see this uprising neck, tiny little beady eyes,

and that shape would not work on the Continent.

Some jaguar would get in and just rip it apart, but in this Eden-like atmosphere of Galapagos,

it doesn't need the protection any more.

The shell's 1mm thick, just enough to hold it together so it doesn't

fall in two halves on the trail.

The last living tortoise on Pinta was recorded in 1906.

After that, only bones were found.

Until, that is, in 1971, a visiting snail scientist happened to recount

the details of his collecting trip to tortoise expert Peter Pritchard.

I was talking about saddle-back tortoises and adaptations for certain kinds of islands and,

he said, "Well, you know the tortoise we saw last week on Pinta

"wasn't really very saddle-backed."

I said, "What did you say?"

I just about dropped my teeth. He said, "We were in Pinta doing snails

"and this tortoise came out,

"and it was only one we saw, so I took a picture of it". I said, "Can I see the picture?"

This one photo brought a species thought to be extinct back to life.

Inspired by this evidence of a living Pinta tortoise,

the National Park authorities immediately sent out a search party.

This, the only footage ever taken of a tortoise on Pinta,

was recorded by Peter Pritchard who,

keen to share in this remarkable discovery, had followed

the Park Rangers out to the island.

By the time I arrived, they had found Lonesome George,

and he was tied up by one leg,

hobbling around on the little area just behind the coast,

and waiting to be taken away.

He was taken to the National Park headquarters on Santa Cruz Island

for safe-keeping.

News of his discovery spread far and wide.

And he became the most famous tortoise in the world.

I mean, anyone who knows about tortoises or Galapagos

knows about Lonesome George.

Lonesome's story brought the plight of the Galapagos tortoises

to the attention of the world, at a time when there was growing concern

about the impact of man on nature.

Yet, despite this, the natural riches of the Galapagos

continued to be plundered.

Nowhere are those riches more vivid than under the waves.

This is one of the most productive tropical marine ecosystems in the world.

The impact of local fishermen on this marine life had always been small.

Fishing was primarily for subsistence

as the islands' remote location meant there was no external market.

But, in 1989, there was a change in the fishermen's fortunes.

A market suddenly opened for a rather unlikely catch -

the sea cucumber.

These animals are a delicacy in the Far East.

They're cooked in soups and considered to be an aphrodisiac.

Asian buyers arrived in Galapagos, offering large amounts of cash to anyone who could supply them.

Fishermen used to earning a few hundred dollars a year could

earn several thousand in a day, just by picking the defenceless animals up off the sea floor.

The sea cucumber bonanza changed the islands forever.

Hundreds of fishermen from the Continent streamed into the islands.

Soon, they were harvesting up to a million animals every week.

Within a few years, the sea cucumbers had all but disappeared.

It was time for the National Park authorities to step in.

They set quotas and imposed size restrictions,

and not just for sea cucumbers,

but for all marine resources - lobster numbers were also in rapid decline.

They had the authority to confiscate illegal catches,

while legal catches were validated

with their stamp of approval - the image of Lonesome George.

This was the first time the National Park had seriously

concerned itself with the day-to-day affairs of the Galapagan people,

and not everyone was pleased.

The fishermen demonstrated against ever tighter restrictions,

complaining they could no longer make a basic living.

They vented their anger against the National Park,

even burning an effigy of the park's director.

In the year 2000, the National Park buildings on Isabela Island

were comprehensibly trashed.

Scrawled on the walls were threats to the lives of the staff who worked here.

Ever since the National Park got involved with sea cucumber fishery,

there has been tension between them and the fishermen.

They've even received death threats to their icon, Lonesome George.

"The National Park authorities and other conservation bodies are more

"concerned with the welfare of the animals than the people."

That's the claim of the leaders of the local fishing co-operatives.

To try and address this, the National Park host regular meetings

with the fishermen to discuss how to manage the marine environment.

How to provide for the fishermen, yet still uphold the ban on sea cucumber collecting.

There's much talk of finding alternative employment for the fishermen.

Titi Rendon is Head of the Santa Cruz fishing co-operative.

One of the problems for both the park and the fishing co-operative

is enforcing the regulations so that the marine life can recover.

Having decimated the lobster and sea cucumber fisheries,

some fishermen with no alternative employment available

are now turning their attention to another lucrative catch.

Sharks are being targeted, butchered for their fins.

There are worrying parallels with the sea cucumber boom.

The shark fins are sold for vast sums to the Far East

where they're used to thicken ceremonial soup.

This is strictly illegal.

Galapagos has one of the best set of laws to protect

marine life in the world, but these laws simply can't be enforced.

Just as with sea cucumbers, it's "grab what you can before it's gone".

Shark numbers are already in decline.

It's been predicted the sharks

of Galapagos will have all but disappeared in ten years.

Removing these top predators is also damaging

one of the world's most spectacular underwater ecosystems.

There are likely to be knock-on effects right through the food chain.

It's not just the damage to marine life that is a cause for concern.

The Galapagos Islands are regularly voted the best dive destination in the world.

For all the underwater wonders, there is one star attraction.

Every diver dreams of seeing live sharks.

Diving is the fastest-growing sector of the largest industry

in the Galapagos - tourism.

Killing one of tourism's top attractions

is undermining the very industry that could provide employment

for out-of-work fishermen.

It's in the interests of the tourist sector to limit the damage

being done by the fishermen.

One of the biggest dive operations is owned by Herbert Frey.

Whether all those involved can be persuaded to abandon shark finning,

in favour of a new life in tourism, remains to be seen.

What's certain is the tourist sector is well aware

of the need for better protection of the wildlife it depends on.

Cause celebre for the conservation movement, Lonesome George

has been embraced by a tourism industry keen to show its support

for the protection of the wildlife.

Almost every tourist shop sells souvenirs bearing his image and name.

Lonesome George has achieved celebrity status.

He's on the itinerary of every single visitor,

and is presented as living proof

of what can go wrong when humans invade this fragile paradise.

But not one tourist will ever visit his homeland, Pinta Island.

It's off limits. In fact, it's so little visited

that for a long time, hope survived that there might be more tortoises

hiding on the island, and with good reason.

A few years after the discovery of Lonesome George, this shell

was found by scientists visiting Pinta.

The shell beside me here is of great interest,

because this is a Pinta tortoise and it's an empty shell,

but it's with scutes on, and they fall off when the animal's been dead

for a year or so.

So, when that animal was collected and brought into this controlled

environment, it hadn't been dead for probably more than a year.

And it was found on Pinta two or three years after Lonesome George was found.

So there was more poking around there.

Peter Pritchard planned a final and exhaustive search of Pinta

in the hope more tortoises were hiding on the wild and remote island.

So this was a systematic transecting of the vegetative parts of Pinta.

But they found no sign of a living tortoise.

We found 15 skeletons of tortoises in...

none killed by man as far as we can tell.

They were all in deep ravines, which the tortoises fell in and could

not escape, and the bones were lying there in the bottom of the ravine.

The crew was not used to gathering bones - it's not part

of their standard marching orders,

but I said, "Look, fellas, this is Pinta.

"No-one else is making any more of these things.

"We've got to gather these bones up". We rounded up everything, from used plastic food bags to my underwear,

to whatever else you could find, to parcel these things up.

And we got them back here,

and they're boxed up in the reference collection in the Darwin station now.

There was something strange about these bones.

All but one of the 15 skeletons were from male tortoises.

It seems the final blow to the Pinta tortoise was a lack of females.

Exactly what happened on Pinta Island that led to the disappearance

of the female tortoises will never be known.

It happened a long time ago.

The animals in the ravines were old ones.

They had walked around 100 years before they fell into that ravine and died in the bottom of it.

And sometimes we'd find skeletons of three animals mixed in one ravine.

So it's a damn odd way to go -

extinct by masculinisation and falling into potholes.

It's not the normal pattern.

But I think it's what happened on Pinta.

Lonesome George may never have met a female tortoise on Pinta.

Now, any hope of introducing him to one has gone and, with it,

the chance of baby Pinta tortoises.

But there's no reason he shouldn't enjoy other female company,

and the next best thing -

perhaps father their offspring.

Lonesome's lack of interest in his female companions has sparked a lot of comment in the outside world.

There have been rumours he doesn't really know what to do!

It's even been suggested that perhaps George is gay!

But maybe all he needs is a helping hand.

Graciela Cevello was approached by an official

of the National Park with a special assignment.

The hope was if they could collect sperm and freeze it,

one of the females could be artificially inseminated.

Graciela did succeed in arousing George, but he never obliged with any sperm.

Eventually the project was abandoned

and George returned to his solitary ways.

Every failed attempt to reproduce Lonesome

builds to the unavoidable conclusion -

decades ago, and without anyone really noticing,

the Pinta Island tortoise passed the point of no return.

But for a miracle, when Lonesome George dies, his race dies with him.

It may be too late to save the Pinta tortoise, but in the corral

next door to Lonesome are tortoises that were rescued in the nick of time.

These tortoises were also the last of their kind.

They're the only ones found by an extensive search of Espanola Island in the mid-'60s.

Their fate would have been the same as Lonesome George,

but for the fact there are 15 of them - three males and twelve females.

For such ponderous animals, they can be remarkably frisky.

They're also remarkably fertile.

If mating is successful,

a female tortoise will dig a hole in the ground and lay up to 20 eggs.

Fausto is not only caretaker of Lonesome George, but also head

of this captive-breeding programme,

and he and his team have achieved spectacular success.

These three-month-old babies will be fed and sheltered under Fausto's

watchful eye until big and strong enough to fend for themselves.

The plan is then to return them to their native Espanola Island.

Following this success, tortoise breeding programmes were

established for other tortoise populations on other islands.

Isabela Island is by far the largest in Galapagos.

It has five distinct tortoise populations on five volcanoes.

This central volcano

is home to the largest population in the archipelago.

They number several thousand animals.

Because they live in these inaccessible heights,

they escaped the ravages of the 18th- and 19th-century sailors.

The two southern populations didn't fare so well.

Incidents of illegal tortoise hunting and eating still occur today.

It's thought this is the work of disgruntled fishermen sending

a grisly message to the National Park.

A new breeding centre was established by the National Park

to rescue the two southern populations of Isabela tortoises.

Oscar Carvajal runs the breeding programme.

Though troubled by the continuing hunting, Oscar is concerned by a more insidious

danger facing the tortoises -

another legacy of man's arrival on these once pristine islands.

Goats are perfectly adapted to the arid Galapagos climate.

They will feed on almost anything, and have an incredible capacity to reproduce.

Introduce a few animals onto an island, and after a few years

there will be several thousand.

Goats are the biggest threat to tortoises on most of the islands,

including Isabela.

They strip the vegetation bare, leaving nothing for the tortoises to eat.

Giant tortoises evolved, in the absence of mammals,

as the principal herbivore on the Galapagos Islands.

They simply cannot compete with the fleet-footed,

rapidly reproducing goats.

The National Park decided this severe problem

needed a radical solution.

Helicopters and sharp-shooters

flown in from New Zealand patrolled 400,000 hectares

of goat-infested island - a landscape denuded

by the insatiable pests.

There were 100,000 goats on northern Isabela alone. Now there are none.

It's the first time such a large-scale mammal eradication project

has achieved such success.

The value of goat eradication is certainly not lost on Fausto.

The latest generation of offspring from the 15 Espanola tortoises

rescued from the wild are almost ready for release onto their native island.

They're weighed and measured

and will then be quarantined for two months.

Their return to Espanola will be timed to coincide

with the rainy season, to ensure there is vegetation for them to eat.

Espanola is a small, uninhabited and sparsely vegetated island

in the south of the archipelago.

This island, like Isabela, was once over-run with goats, but not any more.

The island's small size made the goat cull here

a much easier prospect than on Isabela.

The last goat was shot in 1978 and since then, Fausto has been bringing

baby tortoises back to Espanola.

With their island free of goats, the future of Espanola's tortoises ought to be assured.

But that's not the end of the story.

The National Park have received threats from angry fishermen that

goats might at any time be released back onto the remoter islands.

And there are other threats far harder to pinpoint and deal with

that affect not just tortoises but all the endemic species.

They arise from the very source that some have hailed as the salvation of the animals of the Galapagos.

Three planes a day fly in from the mainland.

Visitors from all around the world arrive, eager to see for themselves

the remarkably tame wildlife in this apparently pristine archipelago.

But the endless stream of people

has brought to an end the islands' isolation.

The isolation that was for so long

the Galapagos wildlife's best protection from human disturbance.

The tourists could be endangering the wildlife they've come to see.

The endemic animals have evolved largely free from competition or disease.

This leaves them especially vulnerable to any germs the visitors might be inadvertently carrying.

Giant tortoises have been dying from a type of influenza,

similar to that found in humans.

Verna Cedeo is head of a new genetics lab set up in Galapagos

to help with conservation,

identifying potential biological threats to the wildlife and seeking solutions.

The tortoise has to be immobilised before its health check.

This tortoise is one of a population living

in the highlands of Santa Cruz,

the island with the highest human population and greatest number of visiting tourists.

So far, the tortoise numbers are not being seriously affected by the virus.

This monitoring is to make sure the situation doesn't get any worse.

But the threat from disease is a serious one.

Although the tortoises of Santa Cruz may be safeguarded for now,

very worrying results are coming to light in studies of another iconic Galapagan creature.

Darwin's finches, so named because they are said to have inspired

the great naturalist's theory of evolution, are a group of 13 species

of birds endemic to the islands.

Each species has a unique role within the islands' ecology.

Sarah Huber has been investigating a population of these birds

in the highlands of Santa Cruz above the main town of Puerto Ayora.

She has uncovered a potential disaster.

These maggots are the larvae of a parasitic fly.

They literally eat the nestlings alive.

As you get more and more parasites, their feeding holes become bigger and

you actually get these large holes in the body cavity.

If the parasite is prevalent throughout the entire island, and

we see rates of mortality like this on the entire island, then chances of extinction are very likely.

These Darwin's finches, famous for bringing the idea of evolution

to life, are following Lonesome George down the road to extinction.

The parasite, I guess, came from mainland Ecuador.

Nobody really knows how it got over.

Speculations are that it came with food or other, you know, on a boat or an airplane.

The port of Puerto Ayora,

capital of the tourism industry, is constantly buzzing with activity.

Everyday, boats are bringing goods from the mainland to provide for

the tourists, and all the people who work in the tourist industry.

Every boat carries the risk of alien species hiding among the cartons of fruit and veg.

And the flow of goods is only set to increase.

Tourism in Galapagos is growing by 10% every year.

The sleepy fishing town of Puerto Villamil on Isabela,

former centre of the sea cucumber fishery, is already preparing for a fresh economic boom.

A new airport will be receiving flights directly from the mainland by the end of the year.

The islanders are busy getting ready for a flood of visitors.

New hotels and restaurants

are going up all over town.

The boom in tourism is driving a boom in immigration.

The resident population of Galapagos is increasing by 6% every year.

After all, tourism has made these islands one of Ecuador's richest provinces.

But once here, the immigrants also feel the pressure of so many people.

Puerto Ayora is rapidly filling every corner of space set aside

for the town by the National Park.

The buildings are going up to house people drawn in from the mainland

to fill jobs created by the ever-expanding tourism industry.

Tourism and consequently population growth is spiralling out of control.

One thing is for sure, tourism is here to stay.

To limit the risk of introducing alien species and disease, there

need to be major changes to the way tourism is managed and supported.

The flood of imports to feed the tourists, for example,

needs to be minimised, and that means food self-sufficiency.

There is little established agriculture on Galapagos.

A large acreage of the verdant highlands was

cleared by early settlers before the National Park was ever created,

but this was just for cattle.

Now these pastures hold the potential for a self-sustainable archipelago, if the problems

of growing vegetables organically on these soils can be ironed out.

The organisation Fundar Galapagos

aims to promote new ways of life for the islanders.

Self-sufficiency would clearly reduce the volume of imports,

but it requires the acceptance of fewer exotic goods by local people,

especially by the stream of new arrivals who don't all appreciate

the need to live within sustainable limits.

Immigration is being driven by a demand for skilled labour.

A new generation of local residents need to be better qualified for

a life in tourism, if the influx of outsiders is to be stemmed.

One initiative is this cookery class established in the town's largest school.

The project is run by Chef Pablo Guerrero from one of the larger hotels.

The idea is not simply to teach the students haute cuisine, but to give them a better

understanding of why this place they live in is so special and why there

needs to be restrictions in place to preserve the islands.

There are many ways an educated and enlightened generation

of Galapagans could contribute to the protection of their islands.

Virna Cedea regularly invites school classes into her genetics laboratory

to give them an insight into conservation work within Galapagos.

A new generation of native islanders, appreciating conservation and the need to live sustainably,

who reject the mentality of "take what you can without regard for the future"

surely offer the best hope for the preservation of these islands.

The future of these islands really does lie with the people who live here.

If the people of Galapagos can pull together towards a shared goal

to preserve what is theirs, the crisis might yet be averted.

Galapagos is still the most pristine tropical archipelago in the world,

but it no longer enjoys the isolation that both shaped and preserved it.

It remains a global treasure, a unique Garden of Eden.

But a greater understanding of its fragility is needed, if its beauty and innocence is to be sustained.

The alternative is staring us in the face.

Like a ghost back from the grave, Lonesome George

is an ever-present reminder of the vulnerability of Galapagos wildlife.

Even though Lonesome was saved, the Pinta tortoise is effectively extinct.

But that's not the end of the story for Pinta Island.

The National Park hope to return it to the condition that existed

before the first human set foot there.

Central to this ambition,

and right next door to Lonesome, are the Espanola tortoises.

Genetic studies have revealed0

they are the closest relation to Lonesome George,

making Espanola tortoises the most likely ancestors of those on Pinta.

But the two islands are at opposite ends of the archipelago,

which begs the question, how did the ancestors of Lonesome George

make it from Espanola all the way to Pinta?

It's probably 150 miles away, I wouldn't be surprised.

But if you look at the sweep of the Humboldt current coming up South America

and through the archipelago,

it sort of washes around Espanola and carries on up to Pinta.

So the tortoise wouldn't need to do any cross-current dynamic swimming.

It would just need to accidentally fall in the sea and survive a week

or two, bobbing around like a cork in the ocean,

because the same shell and the same thick skin that allow this animal

to survive where you and I would die

of thirst in two days, keeps the sea water out.

And the other good thing is, they have long necks,

so a normal tortoise would probably find its head under water

most of the time if it was floating at sea,

but these have a little periscope-like head.

They just have to have the luck and the lottery of life to wash up on Pinta.

Fausto is returning to Pinta Island for the first time in 30 years.

He is accompanied by a team of National Park Rangers and their hunting dogs.

They are here to to check that the island is free of goats.

The National Park officials are considering a plan to put Espanola tortoises onto Pinta Island.

Pinta is one of the remotest and least-visited islands

in the Galapagos.

Nobody has ever lived here, and tourists are forbidden from visiting these shores.

It remains one of the most untouched islands

in an archipelago itself heralded as the most pristine in the world.

The only major disturbances have been the slaughter

of the tortoises and introduction of three goats in the '50s.

Their 40,000 descendants were eradicated 20 years later

by Fausto and a team of rangers.

Now that the goats have gone, the island has no large herbivores,

the role once fulfilled by the ancestors of Lonesome George.

Thinking ecologically, you might want to put Espanola tortoises on Pinta,

just to make the ecology complete.

And possibly even repeat the evolutionary experiment that led

from Espanola to Pinta tortoises

at some fairly remote time in the past.

Give it another try.

See if the island shapes them the same way.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd - 2006

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