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WONDERS OF NATURE
The Galapagos archipelago. Nature miracle
Sixteen large islands and fifty small ones spread out in a picturesque group near the equator, a thousand kilometers from the coast of South America. These islands are of volcanic origin. And today they are often shaken by tremors, foreshadowing new eruptions, and then fiery tongues of lava splash out of menacing craters that adorn mountainous patches of land lost in the expanses of the largest ocean on Earth. In total, there are seventeen volcanoes on the archipelago, and the highest - Albemarle on Isabel Island - exceeds a height of one and a half kilometers.
The first European to see the islands that appeared in front of him from a dense veil of fog was a Spaniard, Bishop Berlanga of Panama. This happened in 1535. The spectacle that opened the eyes of the bishop seemed to him so fabulous and unreal that he gave the islands the poetic name Las Encantadas (in Spanish - "enchanted"). Berlanga later said that he met on the archipelago "stupid birds that did not even know how to hide," and huge turtles weighing up to two hundred kilograms. They could be ridden. Subsequently, it was from them that the modern name of the islands came - Islas de Galapagos ("Turtle Islands"). Over the past five centuries, many bitter and glorious pages have been written in the history of the islands. English pirates took refuge here during the time of Drake, then whalers and seal hunters founded their base here, and in the 1940th century, Ecuador, who owns the archipelago, set up a hard labor settlement on the islands. In the XNUMXs, the United States established a naval base here to protect the Panama Canal from attacks by the Japanese fleet. But the brightest page in the annals of the Galapagos is not associated with pirates or battleships, but with the name of the great Darwin, who lived here for five weeks in 1835 - exactly three hundred years after Berlanga. It was the stay in this small, but diverse and full of life archipelago, isolated from external contacts, that prompted the young English naturalist to thoughts and ideas that later resulted in his famous scientific work on the origin of species. I must say that the flora and fauna of the islands is not very rich, but it is extremely unusual. The main plant in the Galapagos is the prickly pear cactus, which grows to gigantic sizes. With no rain falling on the islands for eight months of the year, this desert dweller has little to no competition here. Ten-meter cacti of the archipelago even have a real trunk covered with bark, like a tree. I must say that even in their homeland, in Mexico, prickly pear does not reach such a huge growth. Only nine species of mammals live here, but all of them are found only in the Galapagos archipelago. There are no amphibians at all, but all reptiles, with one exception, are also purely Galapagos. These are unique marine iguanas, similar to fossil lizards and getting their food deep in the sea, sometimes at a depth of ten meters, and their land relatives, and sea lizards, and, of course, the main decoration of the islands is the giant Galapagos tortoises. Imagine a huge bone hemisphere of a meter in diameter and half a meter in height, slowly moving on wide clawed paws along the slope and lifting its head high on its long neck in search of a leaf or twig. Galapagos tortoises are among the longest-lived world record holders. They live for two hundred years or more, so when riding such a "living tank", one should not forget that, perhaps, the great Darwin himself once sat on it. Unfortunately, they were the first to feel the heavy hand of man. Sailors who came to the islands for fresh water, or sheltered here from storms, quickly realized that giants in bone armor that could go without food for months were ideal "living canned food", and they took hundreds of them in their holds to send to the kitchen as needed. . In the XNUMXth century alone, whalers caught and removed from the islands at least two million turtles! Now, out of fifteen species of turtles on the islands, four are on the verge of extinction, and the fifth is completely destroyed. It's better with birds. There are as many as sixty species of birds in the archipelago, and half of them are found only here. There are thirteen breeds of finches alone. The cactus finch, which uses real "tools" to hunt insects, is especially striking in its habits! In order to extract the caterpillars hiding in the cracks in the bark of cacti, the finch breaks off the needle from the prickly pear and pricks the hidden prey on it, after which it takes it out and eats it. Galapagos pigeons, Galapagos buzzards, Galapagos flightless cormorants, as well as funny and touching masked boobies are not found elsewhere. These amazing birds in the mating season give each other beautiful green branches as a symbol of love. Amazingly, even a special kind of penguin lives on the Galapagos Islands. How a native of Antarctica managed to get to the archipelago located on the equator is not clear. After all, even the "cold" Peruvian Current, which runs along the entire South America, has a water temperature of plus twenty-two degrees. And at the other, the warm Panama Current, which also washes the archipelago, the waters are heated to twenty-eight degrees! Too hot for penguins, isn't it? It is interesting that next to the colonies of these characteristic inhabitants of the polar ice can be found in the Galapagos and typically tropical birds like the frigatebird. The latter, as well as gulls, gannets, petrels and albatrosses, form here, on small rocky islands, huge bird colonies inhabited by almost a million birds. Since the time of Bishop Berlanga, the habits of birds have not changed. They are still trusting and let a person very close, even allowing them to stroke themselves and pick up chicks. The sea off the coast of the Galapagos Islands is also teeming with life. No wonder in recent years the archipelago has been chosen by scuba diving enthusiasts. Indeed, in the local waters there is something to see. In addition to whales, dolphins and schools of many thousands of tropical fish, common in other areas of the Pacific Ocean - luminaries, rays, tuna and others - huge flocks of fur seals and sea lions frolic off the coast of the Galapagos, whose grace, flexibility and swiftness can only be appreciated by watching them in their native element. True, if sea lions devote the whole day to hunting and often fall into the lens of a movie camera, then seals, on the contrary, are active only at night. On the shore, these animals seem clumsy and lazy, like marine iguanas, these creepy-looking "aliens from the Jurassic period." But still, on land, a traveler who gets to the islands is likely to find other objects to observe. The picturesque islands of the archipelago, unlike one another, will give him a whole bunch of impressions. It is enough to cross any of them from the coast to the black peaks of volcanic mountains with their smoking craters, and the most unusual creatures of wildlife will meet and amaze you along the way. Three vegetation zones are clearly distinguished on the islands. From sea level to a height of two hundred meters, an arid strip stretched. In this semi-desert, the role of trees is played by the already mentioned giant prickly pear, surprising even the Mexicans with their dimensions. You don’t often see a plant with a trunk in two girths in life, especially if this plant is a cactus. Surprisingly, prickly pear grows only on those islands where there are turtles. What is the connection between them, science has not yet been able to figure out. Having risen above two hundred meters, the traveler finds himself in a real jungle, entwined with vines and full of bright orchids. Here, due to the abundance of fog, evergreen equatorial forests grow, turning from a height of five hundred meters into damp meadows overgrown with sedge and ferns. Even higher, there is no vegetation at all. Here is the realm of hardened lavas and volcanic ash. And although even the largest Galapagos volcanoes are not too high, the peaks offer a strikingly beautiful view of a scattering of intricately indented islands scattered in the vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean. The archipelago, by the way, is not so small: from south to north it stretches for a good three hundred kilometers, and its area reaches almost eight thousand square kilometers. It is approximately equal in territory to the Canary Islands and twice the size of the Cape Verde Islands or the Samoa archipelago. Now almost all of it has been declared a National Park, and a marine reserve has been organized in the adjacent waters. And, despite the almost complete absence of poachers, local ecologists have enough worries. The fact is that the brought here and run wild "companions of man" - goats, dogs, cats and rats - bring great harm to the local fauna and flora. Goats destroy all the vegetation in the meadows of the islands where they live, down to the last roots, and at the same time trample the ground with their hooves so that the green slopes turn into a kind of scorched desert, on the surface of which not a single grain or seed will sprout. Dogs are the worst enemies of iguanas and lizards, and besides, they do not disdain turtle eggs. From cats, in turn, there is no life for birds and young reptiles. Now the archipelago is home to XNUMX feral goats, XNUMX dogs, XNUMX cats, and an uncountable population of rats. Efforts to reduce their number have met with varying degrees of success. And the harm from these "immigrants" is enormous. Wild dogs alone kill thirty thousand iguanas, fifteen thousand penguins and three thousand sea lions a year. The workers of the National Park took up the extermination of uninvited aliens. But as soon as some of the dogs were destroyed, the number of cats increased sharply. (And the surviving dogs learned to hide from hunters and quickly restored their numbers.) When half the cats were exterminated, rats bred in huge numbers, which neither traps nor poisoned bait could cope with. The announcement of the islands as a protected area for all these four-legged "poachers" is, of course, an empty phrase. Only thoughtful and comprehensive measures to combat them will help preserve the nature of the unique archipelago. Author: B.Wagner
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