By Gonzalo Solano, nzherald.co.nz
Thursday August 16, 2012
Lonesome George's inability to reproduce made him a global symbol of
efforts to halt the disappearance of species. And while his kind died with him,
that doesn't mean the famed giant tortoise leaves no heir apparent.
The Galapagos Islands have another centenarian who fills a shell pretty
well. He's Diego, a prolific, bossy, macho reptile.
Unlike Lonesome George, who died on June 24, Diego symbolises not a
dying breed but one resurrected.
Having sired hundreds of offspring, Diego has been central to bringing
the Espanola Island type of tortoise back from near extinction, rangers at
Galapagos National Park say.
Diego was plucked from Espanola by expeditioners sometime between 1900
and 1930 and wound up in the San Diego Zoo in California, said the head of the
park's conservation programme, Washington Tapia.
When the US zoo returned him to the Galapagos in 1975, the only other known
living members of his species were two males and 12 females.
Chelonoidis hoodensis - some consider it
a species, some a subspecies - had been all but destroyed, mostly by domestic
animals introduced by humans that ate their eggs.
So Diego and the others were placed in a corral at the park's breeding
centre on Santa Cruz, the main island in the isolated archipelago whose unique
flora and fauna helped inspire Charles Darwin's work on evolution.
Diego was so dominant and aggressive, bullying other males with bites
and shoves, that he had to be moved eight years later to his own pen, with five
of the females. The reptiles are not monogamous.
"Diego is very territorial, including with humans," said his
keeper, Fausto Llerena.
"He once bit me, and two weeks ago he tried (again) to bite me.
When you enter his pen, Diego comes near and his intentions aren't
friendly."
A US-based herpetologist for the Galapagos Conservancy, Linda Cayot,
says Diego is the most sexually active of the bunch because he's the biggest
and the oldest of the males.
"In tortoises, the biggest dominates. It's not that the others
aren't active. It's just that he's dominant," she says.
Tapia says it is impossible to know Diego's age, but he is well over
100. He estimates Diego is the father of 40 to 45 per cent of the 1781
tortoises born in the breeding programme and placed on Espanola island.
At least 14 species of giant tortoise originally inhabited the islands
1000 kilometres off Ecuador's Pacific coast and 10 survive, their features developing
in sync with their environment, as Darwin observed.
Espanola, which encompasses 130 square kilometres, is arid, and in order
to reach vegetation high off the ground, the tortoises there developed the
longest legs and necks of any tortoise species in the archipelago.
Diego is nearly 90 centimetres long, weighs 80 kilograms and has a black
saddleback shell.
Llerena says tourists take to him automatically, if from a safe
distance.
"I think he's going to be the successor to Lonesome George, the new
favourite."
A visit to Lonesome George became de rigueur for celebrities and common
folk alike among the 180,000 people who annually visit the Galapagos. Among his
last visitors were Richard Gere, Prince Charles of England and Brad Pitt,
Angelina Jolie and family.
Before humans arrived in the Galapagos, the six islands were home to
tens of thousands of giant tortoises. Numbers were down to about 3000 in 1974,
but the recovery programme run by the national park and the Charles Darwin
Foundation has succeeded in increasing the overall population to 20,000.
The offspring of Diego and his male rivals in the corrals of Santa Cruz
have themselves been reproducing in the wild on Espanola Island since 1990.
"We can now say that the reproduction of this species is guaranteed,"
said Tapia.
Cayot was asked whether having so many children of the same few parents
interbreeding on Espanola could hurt the breed's long-term prospects.
"It could be a problem," she said.
"But it is more important to save the species."
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