Galápagos
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Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Soren Wheeler. Lulu and Latif are out this week. So I'm just going to step in to play an episode that, well, if I'm honest, it's just one that I felt like hearing and running again at this moment just because. So today, a little step back in time to one of my favorite radio producers, Tim Howard, telling us the story of a truly singular spot on the face of our Earth. Here we go. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab. And today...

We begin on a plane. Thank you, Brooke. Which carried our newly married producer, Tim Howard, to the Galapagos. So I took the plane from Quito. We had just finished the honeymoon that morning, me and Brooke. They make announcements, and at a certain point, the flight attendants, they open up all of the overhead bins and they walk up and down.

spraying some sort of insecticide. For what? For like a... Invasive species, I think. Yeah, like whatever bugs might have snuck out of the plane. But at this point, I'm getting super excited and I'm thinking about Darwin and I start reading Voyage of the Beagle, his book, on this nook that I had bought for the trip.

But then my power supply didn't work and my nook died. That was a big problem for Darwin, too. He took one down to power. His nook. Oh, God. And then the islands come into sight.

What is the color of the Pacific Ocean when you look out the plane window? That was actually the first thing I noticed. It's this totally wild, like I've never seen like this storybook blue-green iridescent aquamarine. And I'm thinking like, wow, this is going to be like dropping into another world. You know, like nature in its purest form. My version was, is my dream of what it would be like is you land on it and it's sort of like liquid.

low, grassy knoll, and an enormous turtle comes by. The one that you could sit on the top of and it wouldn't notice that you were there. Just kind of meets you at the airport. Just wandering by. Exactly. That's very similar to what I was picturing. But... We land, we take the 40-minute bus ride to Puerto Ayora.

Puerto Ayora. Puerto Ayora. Puerto Ayora. Which turns out to be kind of a big town. Tons of people live there. Sounds like a fishing village, tons? No, it's way bigger than a fishing village. And just let me say that my first hours in Galapagos were totally different than I was expecting. Oh, God. It's sort of the first thing that really is just like, where the hell am I? I...

I'm walking through the town, it's kind of late. The sun is just starting to set. I'm actually walking down Charles Darwin Avenue. Just kind of getting the lay of the land when all of a sudden... This line of cars comes around the corner honking, endless honking.

and they're waving flags, blue flags. At first I didn't know what the hell was happening, but turns out it was an election rally. And I was just really blown away that this continued.

this procession for like 15 minutes. And I remember asking one guy, "They're driving so slow, I can just walk up to them." "I sold a car." I'm like, "Who's your candidate?" And they're like, "I didn't know who the guy was, but turns out he was the incumbent." And I'm like, "Is he gonna win?" And this guy, he doesn't even say anything. He just kind of points. He points at the cars in front and behind as if like, "Dude, seriously?"

You see how many of us there are. But then at a certain point, I noticed this one guy by himself standing on the sidewalk wearing a white shirt and jeans. He's waving a flag, but his flag is a different color. It's white. And it's really loud, but I go up to him and I yell at him, who's your candidate? And he said, I am a candidate. And I'm like, what?

Are you, seriously? So his name is Leonidas. He is a naturalist guide. You actually end up meeting a lot of people employed that way in Galapagos.

And he tells me, politically speaking, he's an outsider. And of course, I'm wondering why he's standing there by himself waving a flag at this entire parade of people who don't support him at all. And he tells me, well, I'm nervous. If the party in power now, the frontrunners, if they get elected, then I see a dark future.

an uncertain future. More big hotels, more of these enormous boats, more people. And if things keep going this way, who's going to stand up for nature? This is Radiolab, and we are dedicating the entire hour to this little set of islands and to that question. As the world is filling up with more and more and more people, is it inevitable that even the most sacred, pristine places on the planet will eventually disappear?

get swallowed up. And how far are we willing to go to return a place to what it was before we got there? And more importantly, can we? Oh, I'm never a doubter. Okay, so this is Linda. Linda Cayo, currently the science advisor for Galapagos Conservancy. I began my work in Galapagos in 1981. She first came to study tortoises. Back then...

You know, Galapagos was really isolated. Barely any cars, super limited electricity. All I remember is having a smile on my face. All the time. Because, you know, as a biologist, going to Galapagos is like going to Mecca. She says you have islands with massive volcanoes and forests. Tree ferns that grow, you know, well above a human's height. Yeah, I mean...

powerful colors, you know, there's green mangroves, black lava flows, and pink flamingos. This is Matthias Espinosa, a naturalist guide in the Galapagos. And like Linda, he says that when he first got to the Galapagos in the 80s, he couldn't believe that the place was real. It was breathtaking. He visited an island called... Fernandina, and the first thing that I saw was a lava flow that was moving. I said, what's going on? No, no, that's not a lava flow. Those are like...

1,000 sea iguanas taking a sunbath. And he says he would go on these dives. Can you imagine schools of hammerhead sharks like 500, 800 passing in front of you? Like tuna. I mean, like sardines. It shows you the power. It shows you also evolution. There is where evolution is very strong.

Okay, so quick context: Galapagos Islands, cluster of islands way off the coast of Ecuador in the Pacific, 19 bigger islands, bunch of smaller ones. And this is the place of course where Darwin landed in 1835.

And as he went island to island, he started noticing that there were all these creatures that were really similar to each other, but also a little bit different. The tortoises had different shells depending on the kind of island they lived on. The finches looked similar, but their beaks were always a little bit different. And this gets him thinking, what if it isn't the way that everybody always says?

What if God didn't create every single species in the beginning and leave them unchanged? What if, in fact, life is purely change? What if everything has been changing all the time? Darwin's five weeks on Galapagos pushed him to develop his theory of evolution. And that's also why when we think of evolution, we think of the Galapagos. And in particular, we think of two iconic creatures, the tortoise and the finch.

Let me start by telling you about the tortoise. It's hot, it's bright. It is such a perfect day for tortoise hunting. Or not hunting, but, you know, looking for. Fourth day I was there, I went to the island of Floriana, which Darwin visited. And there, up in the highlands, basically in the middle of this yard... Oh my god, there are these three massive tortoises just clustered together under a tree. Wow, that is freaking amazing.

Describe them. What do they look like? These are such alien-looking creatures. They're like the size of, jeez, I don't even know what. They're massive. They look like they would crush you to death. I wonder how many years these guys have been here for. They can live for over 150 years. Wow. This is a tortoise trying to get over a branch. What was that? That is the sound of a tortoise breathing. That's cool.

So, Linda, when she first went to Galapagos to study these tortoises about 30 years ago... I did a trip where we backpacked around the caldera. She took a trip to this island called Isabela, hiked up the side of a volcano... And looked at all the tortoise country. And it was an impenetrable forest.

Basically, tortoise heaven. And what makes it so perfect for tortoises is in the dry season in Galapagos, the garua, which is a very, very thick mist, comes onto the island. It rolls over this forest. And it catches in the branches of the trees. The water then drips down from the top of the trees down to the ground. Creating what we call drip pools.

which provides tortoises with water during the dry season, and they like to rest in water. And so there, under the trees, you have these ponds with dozens of tortoise domes just rising out of the water. So that was my first experience. It was a magical, magical area. And then I actually didn't get back there for maybe 15 years from when I was there the first time. And when I returned...

that forest was 100% gone.

The drip pools were just dry dust bowls. Wow. There was no shade. Tortoises were sitting out in the sun or crowded around a couple of stalks that were still there. This is Carl Campbell. I work for Island Conservation, and I'm based here in the Galapagos Islands. Carl's actually the guy who showed me those tortoises. It was just a barren landscape. Yeah, barren, barren grounds.

What happened to the forest? Um, goats. Goats. That was definitely not what I thought you were going to say. I thought you were going to say people. It was kind of a collaboration. So here's the story.

Goats were originally sort of brought to the Galapagos by pirates and whalers. Back in the 1500s, you had tons of sailors making these long voyages across the Pacific. And Galapagos was, you know, the major port on the whaling route where, you know, you'd come and get fresh water, but you'd also come in and pick up tortoises, land tortoises. And, you know, boats would take away several hundred of them often.

and turn them upside down, and they can last for up to a year and a half in the hold of a ship. Like lying there upside down? Yeah, lying there upside down. In order to make space for the tortoises, the whalers and pirates would often take goats that they'd brought with them and throw them onto the islands. That way, when they're on their way back and sick of eating tortoises, they could grab those goats.

So whalers and buccaneers, they introduced goats to Galapagos. But on islands like Isabella, which is this massive island, the size of Rhode Island, the goats were actually penned in to just a little part of it because there was this black lava rock that ran across the island. Extremely rough lava that's extremely difficult to walk across. Twelve miles of it. So that had acted as a barrier. Basically with goats on one side, tortoises on the other.

But according to Linda... Sometime in the late 1970s... The goats got brave. I mean, we're probably talking just a few goats. But by the 1990s, those few goats, the population had exploded to about 100,000 goats. Wow. And if you think of 100,000 goats...

eating everything in their path. Every sort of plant, even the bark off of trees. They destroy the forest.

So now they had a dilemma. On the one hand, the tortoises needed help. On the other hand, you had all of these goats that didn't choose to be on the island. It wasn't their fault. And the goats that were out there were gorgeous. They had curled horns, different colored fur, just beautiful animals. And they'd been there for 500 years. Some people were concerned with goats have their own, if you will, right to be there.

Those arguments came up frequently. To which Carl would respond. Are we going to let tortoises go extinct? There's thousands of islands around the world that have goats on them. These tortoises are only found here. So where do your values lie?

And so in 1994, we had what we called the Tortoise Summit in England. And that was where we started the discussions about what are we going to do. Experts came from all over the world. Linda says we want to get rid of the goats. And many of them thought we were nuts and that it was impossible. There's 100,000 of them. So many doubters. Carl says he even heard the idea. Why don't you put lions? You know, they eat goats in Africa. You know, why don't you get lions on there? Yeah.

And those are, you know, really interesting ideas, but at some point they're going to get hungry and they're going to start eating all the other things that, you know, you treasure, like the occasional tourist. In any case, after endless planning and meetings... Took eight years, I think. They commence Project Isabella.

So the helicopters we used, they're called MD-500s. Small helicopter, they're for four passengers and one pilot. Single turbine, five blades. This is Fraser. Fraser Sutherland. I was the engineer, pilot, and a sharpshooter. 2004 through to 2006. Almost every day during that time, Fraser would fly over Isabella Island.

Two guys with two shooters either side of the helicopter. What you do is, so you come across and you're flying along and you might see one goat. Says you'd follow that goat as it ran away till it joined its friends. So you have to find all those other goats. Circle real low. You'd fly around them. Round them up. Try and get them in a single group. And then you start picking off the goats one by one by one. And there are actually videos online where you see these packs of goats running for their lives.

and then dropping to the ground. The last goat or two might sort of run into an area where it's impossible to reach. They'll actually go into caves, and what we'd do is we'd find a location as close as we could or right on top of the cave, drop out one of the two shooters that was in the helicopter, and he'd physically go into the cave, shoot the goats out, or shoot them on sight.

And then you go on. And actually, in under a year through this aerial attack, they end up wiping out 90% of the goats on Isabella. But to give an example of the nature of this business... That's Josh Dunlin. He runs an NGO that was involved in Project Isabella. It's relatively easy to remove 90% of a goat population from an island. But as they become rarer and rarer, they're harder and harder to detect. The goats become, quote, educated. They learn that this sound...

means so the goats start hiding. So they'll go under bushes, they won't move. They'll learn to stand under a tree, holding their breath. And so you end up flying around in an expensive helicopter, not finding any goats. Now the way we deal with that is an interesting one. We use this technique called Judas Goats. Yeah, Judas Goats.

Initially, it was Carl's suggestion. Because goats are gregarious and like being in groups. They're herd animals, right? And so the technique that we would use was you would fire up your helicopter, you'd fly around, you'd find some goats. Capture goats. Capture them live. And then come back. Back to base camp. Offload them. And you put a radio collar on them, and you throw them back on the island. And then you wait.

Instinctively... That lone goat will go and find other goats. A week, two weeks go by. You fire up the helicopter. They get back over the island with this little device. It's a directional antenna. Start tracking the Judas goat. Until they spot it with some other goats. And then everyone gets shot except the Judas goat. They let it go, finds more friends. And then everyone gets shot except the Judas goat. And then they do it again.

Everyone gets shot except the Judas goat. And you do that every two weeks for a year. Oh my God. And that is how they go from 90% goat free to 91 to 92 to 93 to 94. It's like having a pogrom on you over and over and over again. It gets worse. Now, a Judas goat is a good Judas goat until it gets pregnant.

Because then it doesn't want to be social anymore. It goes off and has his kid and is very solitary, which is the last thing you want when you're trying to get goats off islands. So Carl kept mulling this problem. What would it take to basically make, you know, the perfect Judas goat?

The ideal Judas goat, if you will, is a goat that would search for and be searched for. And that would never get pregnant. So Carl Campbell figured out a technique where we could sterilize them in the field. They'd grab the goats, dart them, and then in a matter of minutes... Snip, snip. Did you do this? Yeah, well, I stood next to Carl and watched him do it.

And Carl took it one step further, and he actually gave these females hormone implants. To basically put them into heat. For an extended duration. Normally a female goat would be in heat for maybe a couple days. These females would go... For more than 180 days. And wherever they went, they would lure those male goats out of their caves so that, you know...

All in all, over the course of this two-year program... We had hundreds of Judas goats out. And using those goats, they were able to go from 94% goat-free to 96% to 97% to 98%. And basically when you have only Judas goats meeting up with other Judas goats... Then you can say the goats have been eliminated. That you're done. A point they got to, at least on Isabella, in mid-2006. ♪

This kind of eradication program was far beyond anything that anyone had ever done anywhere in the world. Because, turns out, they weren't just doing this on Isabella Island. No, we're talking about island by island. Over the course of about seven years, they eliminate over 250,000 goats. So you complete that with Isabella, and did it work?

Yeah, the results of this were absolutely impressive. You had plants re-emerging. You had trees growing back. And in a really short period of time. And this allowed for those important drip pools. And tortoises, they basically got their home back. This is a real thing. Tortoises walking around. It's incredible. So they did it. They got all the goats. Not all the goats. What do you mean?

Those Judas goats, they kept them around. Why? I would have shot them first just out of sympathy for them. Yeah, exactly. Well, they needed the goats because, well, there was the problem of people. Because during the 90s, these demonstrations started to happen. Yeah!

demonstrations of outrage and violent activity. Constant conflict to explain.

This is Augustin Lopez, a long-time fisherman, and he told me that in the 70s and 80s, lobster was fished all year round, no restrictions, and then fishermen started making a killing fishing sea cucumber because there was this huge demand. But then the National Park comes in, same group that's doing the goat eradication.

And they tell the fishermen they're overfishing the sea cucumber, they've got to limit their catch. And the fishermen are like, who are you to tell me that I can't feed my family? So they lash out. They march down Charles Darwin Avenue. They would come down the street.

throwing rocks and sticks and everything. That's Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. He was there counter-protesting, and he says that at one point they went after national park buildings. And they were attacking the ranger stations with Molotov cocktails. They blockaded roads. They literally drove the rangers out of the national park headquarters and took it over. On Isabella, they burned down a building. They kidnapped some people, including some of my crew. And they even killed dozens of tortoises, slitting their throats.

According to some accounts, they even hung them from trees. Not only that, but according to Linda, those goats? A couple islands where they've been eliminated, fishermen have put them back. Really? Oh yeah. And so what they decided to do is leave the Judas goats on various islands, where they can live out their sterilized days, chomping on grass, sharing war stories, until such time as they might be needed again.

Is the war between the Greens and the fishermen and such, is that still hot and difficult? And are they still, you know, killing tortoises? They're not. The fishermen, they seem to have stopped, you know, taking over National Park and killing tortoises. You know why? It...

It's a combination of reasons. On the one hand, fishermen have started to participate in the actual fisheries management more because it seems like they realize if they're going to keep their livelihood, they can't just fish everything out. But then at the same time, the tourism economy has been taking off. And so all of these fishermen, they find that it's easier for them to actually survive by using their boats to take tourists around island to island. So they're all kind of converting over into the tourism economy. Huh.

We're going to take a short break. This is Radiolab. We'll be back with producer Tim Howard and this hour on Galapagos in just a moment.

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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts. ♪

I'm Jed Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab. And this hour... Well, the honeymoon's over. Galapagos. This is the place where Darwin began to develop his theory of evolution. And it's the place 170 years... Maybe 180 years later where our producer...

Tim Howard landed wearing fishnets and a Bad Brains t-shirt to find a very different landscape than what Darwin saw. Now, we just told you a story about how far humans are willing to go to protect something. This next part, it's about how far we're willing to go to get something back from

that we've already lost to sort of restore a place and a creature to its, quote, wild state. This story unfolds on one of Galapagos' most northern islands, where they also had to get rid of some goats. It's called Pinta. Yeah, Pinta was a very special place. This is James Gibbs. Professor of conservation biology at the State University of New York. It's one of those islands, it's not part of any tourist visitation site. So there are no people there. And when you set foot first on Pinta, you...

Immediately sense sheer abundance. All the insect life. All the birds. Problem is, on Pinna, things were spinning out of control. The vegetation was growing wild. The forest was getting overgrown with the wrong kind of plants. And the whole ecosystem was just teetering out of balance. And one of the reasons for this, according to Linda Coyote, is that we had an island with no tortoises.

Because tortoises are sort of like the lawnmowers. You know, they plow down vegetation, disperse seeds. But for centuries, they'd been hunted by those whalers. And in about 1906, the pinta tortoise went extinct. 1906? Yeah, a little over 100 years ago. They don't know the exact date. But then, one evening in March of 1972...

Ah, yes. This fellow. Peter C.H. Pritchard. He's a well-known tortoise researcher. He was on Santa Cruz Island having dinner with some friends. And we got into chatting about tortoises. And one of the people he's eating with says, Hey, I was recently on Pena Island collecting snails, and I saw this... Tortoise.

And I thought, do you know what you have done? There have been no tortoises there for a hundred years. He and some National Park rangers race out to Pinta. And there it was. This beautiful tortoise. One male tortoise, maybe 50 years old, they weren't sure. They'd eventually name him... George. Lonesome George. But at the time, the immediate question was... Are there any more? Because if they could find a female for George...

then they could maybe de-extinct the species. So they poked around in the areas where we got the one, and I found a shell of a female. Hey. Dead animal. Oh. How had this female tortoise died? Someone chopped it in half. No. You can see the marks where it was just chopped up. I felt violent. I wanted to borrow someone's gun.

and go and kill the person. Everyone held out hopes for just finding more tortoises back. James says they kept going back, combing the island. With highly trained tortoise-sniffing dogs. But in the end, there was just George. And that then shifted the focus on, now what do we do?

We then went to a wolf volcano. Island next door. And collected two females. Two females that sort of looked like George, but weren't quite the same species. And we put them with George to see if we could get him to breed. He never did. Wasn't interested. So they thought, maybe he needs a pinta lady.

Now, of course, there are no female tortoises on Pinta, but they thought, you know, maybe a zoo somewhere or a private collection has one, because you really never know. So they called around, offered huge cash rewards, people sent in dozens of tortoises, but Linda took one look at them and was like, No. No. No. No! They weren't Pintas.

So then they thought, we've got to take matters into our own hands. Basically, what you do is you sit at the back of the tortoise and first you have to get to where they'll allow you to touch them. And eventually you start...

you know, fondling their legs and tails and hoping to get them to ejaculate. And I had a volunteer working with me. Her name was Sveva Grigioni. She worked with him every other day or so for a few months and was never successful. We were really starting to get kind of desperate about options. And James says, in a way, it was a paradox because on the one hand, awesome, we have an actual living Pinta Island tortoise.

But on the other hand, he might have actually been like the worst possible candidate for last of his kind. He seemed to really like to keep to himself. He never really liked other tortoises much. He didn't seem to like humans. And maybe that's why he survived. He wasn't curious. James says a lot of tortoises. They hear your footsteps. They raise their heads. They come out to see what's going on. And then they get whacked. Yeah.

In any case, for about 40 years, scientists tried everything humanly possible to get Lonesome George to mate with another tortoise so they could resurrect the species and bring Pinta Island back to its original state. Nothing worked. Until... One day in July of 2008, George turns to the two female tortoises that he had been ignoring for years. And he says, Hello, beautiful tortoises.

Inexplicably, he just suddenly decides to mate with both of them. They each lay eggs. Two clutches were ultimately laid in his corral. And the scientists are like... George got our hopes up dramatically, but they ultimately were infertile. Motherf**ker.

In the mid-80s, they were having a meeting about this. That's conservationist Josh Dunlin again. A whole bunch of herpetologists were out there and some island conservationists, and they're talking about what to do with pinta, and they can't get Lonesome George to reproduce, which they were hoping to do because then they could build a pinta population and put it on pinta. And he says that as the meeting wore on, it got

Oh, for sure. In fact, one guy I spoke with, said that at this meeting, there was one guy who just couldn't take it. Ha ha ha!

Because in his view, this single individual was holding up this huge conservation opportunity. And of course the shock was, there was a wave went around the room when he said that.

And really what that guy was specifically saying was don't be precious. A tortoise is a tortoise is a tortoise. Let's just take some tortoises from a nearby island and put them back on Penta. But there's a much bigger question here. That goes way beyond Galapagos.

Which is basically like, what is the right way to protect nature now? People are right now throwing beers at each other around what is the right strategy. Josh says that there are basically two camps right now. On the one side, you've got this classic, like what you might call Eden approach. Conservation biology...

Its foundation is this idea of pristine wilderness. From the very beginning, I think all of us, well, I can't speak for other people, but you always have this idea of wanting to get it back to some kind of pre-human condition. Pre-human being the operative word. And if you think about it, we all have this. We all have this picture of what we want to bring it all back to. You know, it might be like... The plains just covered with...

Buffalo, or maybe the Serengeti Desert with lions and elephants, or maybe it's 10,000 hammerhead sharks, but whatever the scene is, it just doesn't have any people. But is carrying that idea, those pictures in your head, even like...

useful anymore. It's like... So cynical. No, but it just seems so unrealistic. Right? But I mean, in the bigger picture, you can make the argument that humans now affect every square meter of the Earth. There's no place, no matter how remote we get, you can go to the North Pole, it's been affected by human activity.

You can go, I don't know, the depths of the impenetrable jungle. It's been affected by human activity. That's Holly Doremus. She's an environmental law professor at the Berkeley School of Law in California. We're radically remaking the world. And the question is, what's our responsibility? And this brings us to our second school of thought, which, in its most extreme version, goes something like this. We're God. We might as well get good at it. And we're going to have to...

Create these ecosystems based on our best science. And you could argue we're going to have to get a whole lot better at making some very, very difficult decisions. Climate change seems to mean that a lot of species are pretty much doomed.

30%, 40%, 50% of the species now on the planet in a few decades may be disappearing. And this is what I think is really the tough question now is if we concede that we can't any longer save all the species, then does that put us in the situation of having to decide which ones we'll save and which ones we won't? And do we have any basis for making those kinds of decisions? Yeah.

So you're saying that the quote, let's go back to when it was good, let's go back to a better time, that's just silly. I didn't say it was silly. I said it was impossible. Things might not be silly, they might not be stupid ideas, but we still might not be able to do them. Okay, so here's a wood plaque.

that says, Lonesome George is the last survivor of the dynasty of land tortoises from Pinta Island. And in fact, in 2012, after decades of trying to get him to breed, Lonesome George dies. R.I.P. 24th of June, 2012. And the Pinta tortoise went extinct. So damn, case in point, I guess. No going back. Yeah, I mean, that's what I thought.

But then I spoke with this woman. Hello. Hello, Gisela, do you hear me? Yes, I do. Who kind of scrambled everything up for me. Can I get you to introduce yourself? Yes. My name is Gisela Caccone. I am a senior research scientist for Yale University. And Gisela's come up with kind of a radical idea. I call it the Phoenix Project.

Here's a backstory. In the mid-90s, we started in 94, Gisela and some folks from the Galapagos National Park, they began taking a census of all the tortoises in the Galapagos. Every population of tortoises on all the islands. They were going to do this big population study, so they went island by island, took a little bit of blood from all these different tortoises, did a genetic analysis, and au revoir.

found something they never expected. A group of tortoises, not on Pinta, that had a lot of Pinta DNA. I remember very clearly that moment was very, very exciting. It's like, yes, look at this. Wait, you're saying this Pinta DNA was on another island? Yeah. Not on Pinta? No. How would that happen? Uh,

We don't think it was natural. Gisela thinks it might have been the whalers. Either the whalers or the pirates. You know, because like we talked about in the 17, 1800s, these whalers would come along, grab a bunch of tortoises, put them on the ship, and then they would hunt for whales. And sometimes... When they were done and the ship was filled with whale products... There's no room down here. They'd throw a few extra tortoises overboard.

say a few from Pinta. Maybe those Pinta tortoises swam with the currents to that nearby island, set up a little expat community, and started breeding with the locals. That's our working hypothesis. Which brings us to her idea.

You know, on average, 50% of your genome comes from your mom and 50% from your dad, but it's an average. So Gisela thought, just by chance, some of these tortoises are going to have a little bit more pinta DNA from their pinta ancestors.

Yes. So what if we took those tortoises and bred them together? Select them for the next generation so you can give a push to this process. She says if we keep doing that, taking the babies with the most pinta DNA, breeding them together, slowly...

Surely? In four generations, you could have 90% of the pinta genome restored. Really? Yeah, but that's four generations of tortoises, not rats, which means at least 100 years. But...

In the meantime, the vegetation on Pinta is growing out of control. From an ecological point of view, Pinta can't wait. So in 2009, they come up with a stopgap. They take 39 tortoises raised in captivity and they use them as placeholders. They sterilize them and put them on Pinta. Really? What? What?

Yeah. Wow, these are very purist sort of visions they've got. Yeah, they sterilize 39 of them. So they're just basically the lawnmowers. They're not actually breeders. Exactly, and they put them on Pinta, and they're just chomping away right now. They're living out their lives really happily on Pinta, you know, until the originals are ready. Now, Linda says, in the end, you don't actually need to do the full aggressive four-generation breeding thing. You can just take the best Pinta-ish tortoises you find...

and put those on pinta. And, you know, over the next 200,000 years, they will evolve into a pinta tortoise. And it could be a bit different than the past pinta tortoise because evolution and mutation and all that doesn't occur the same. But eventually, nature's going to take over and they will evolve into pinta tortoises. Is this the way that everybody who works on the tortoises thinks about it? This kind of deep time evolution?

I don't know. I'm not sure many other people think about that. Just walked past a newspaper that says 72 hours left in the electoral campaign. And the flags are still flying everywhere. We'll be back in less than 200,000 years. Yeah, but we will be different when we come back. Yeah, we will. Stay tuned.

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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists who moonlight as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab. Today, a whole hour on the Galapagos Islands, the place that inspired Charles Darwin to create his theory of evolution, whose basic ingredients are lots of time, isolation, and then constant change. But Darwin didn't consider this possibility.

What if, on these islands, thousands of tourists arrive every day carrying fruits and chocolates and souvenirs, jumping from island to island? Now, the Galapagos government spends millions of dollars checking all of the goods that come in and out, trying to quarantine the ones that might have things that are a problem. But what if simply putting your foot on the ground can completely transform a place?

Hola, buenos dias. Back to producer Tim Howard. So I met this woman named Heike Jaeger, who is like a plant scientist. I'm the restoration ecologist at the Charles Darwin Foundation. Here we are in Los Gemelos. We were going to look at these incredible craters called Los Gemelos. Oh, I almost got hit by a car. And as we're walking along the path, she's like, oh wait, look at this. Right here.

She points just to the right of the path. Look at this species here. Small leafy green thing. They call it llantén in Spanish. It's plantago. I think in the U.S. they call it the wrench of the white man.

The wrench of the white man? It's actually the footprint of the white man. Doesn't matter. Point is... It's an introduced species. It's introduced. It's found in Europe, North Africa. Shouldn't be here. And you have this one here. She points right next to it. It's called Tadouskantia. Sharpie thing, green and white leaves. It has a terrible common name in English. I'm not going to say it. Wandering Jew.

Basic houseplant. You can buy it at Home Depot. But there it is in the Galapagos. Along this path. Just looking to the right and the left. And then she just starts counting the number of invasive species at one, two, three, four. As you can see here, it's only right next to the trail, but not so much further. You see that they're only there for this border of about five to ten inches along the edge of that path. Why? Why would that be? Because, Heinke said, what happens is it torques.

tourists, they'll be back in their home country, they'll be walking around in a garden or a park, and it'll be filled with tiny seeds. The seeds stick to shoes and socks and trousers. They wear those trousers on the plane, and then they wear them when they come here. And then people walk and then just distribute or disperse the seeds along the trail. Wow.

Now, most of these plants are actually probably harmless. And, you know, like you said, Galapagos National Park, they spend tons of money, tons of time trying to keep invasives out. But the fact is, there's only so much you can do. And every once in a while, one of these hitchhikers slips under the radar and just wreaks havoc.

You just grabbed it just like that. You just put your hands around it. Yeah, but that's only possible the first day. So while we were in the highlands of Santa Cruz, Heinke took me through the woods to meet this guy named Arno. My name is Arno Zimmerdom. He's an ornithologist. From the University of Vienna. And shortly after we walked up, he reached out into this tree and he grabbed this tiny little baby finch right off the branch. Shh!

He's adorable. He's a... Oh my God, he looks a little bit furry, almost. Really tiny. Vulnerable. This is a fledgling of a warbler finch. So the warbler finch is the smallest of the Darwin's finches. You can like see him pulsing kind of as he's breathing. So Darwin's finches. Yeah.

In short, Darwin, when he visited Galapagos, he collected a lot of specimens of finches, took them back to England, and eventually he realized that the beaks had all adapted. They were all a little bit different depending on which island the finches lived on. Were the beaks adapted to whatever the finches were eating? One island's finches had literally, like, the beak would be shaped sort of long, and then the next island, it would look almost the same but much shorter.

And this became one of the most important pieces of evidence that, you know, when animals would move from one place to another, that they would begin to differentiate based on what they were really eating. These are very, very important beaks. Very important, yeah. But speaking of beaks, that finch that Arno was holding... Just a thread. His beak? Did you see the... Especially this side is extremely huge. Oh, yeah. The nostrils have big holes. Yeah.

Something had gotten inside this little finch's nostrils, drilled these holes, and it was now eating the flesh on the inside of the bird's nostrils. Scientists first began to see this in 1997 when they started to find nests full of dead baby finches. At first, nobody had any idea what kind of creature it was, so they began to frantically study it.

I actually visited one of the main researchers, Piedad Lincango. She's lived in Galapagos for over a decade. She showed me her lab. I'm surrounded by shelves, and on the shelves are these tiny little plastic cups that are filled with flies. This is the villain.

A little black fly. Looks like every other fly. In fact, Piedad says that it's actually in the same family as the regular housefly.

But it's actually a bot fly called Philornis downsy. Do you just spell Philornis downsy? Yeah, it's P-H-I-L. I can't spell out loud. Philor. L-O-R-N-I-S-D-O-W-N-S-I. Okay. Philornis actually means bird loving. That's Charlotte Koston. She's a researcher. At the Charles Darwin Foundation. She says there's actually very little known about the fly. They're not sure where it came from or quite how it got here. But here's what they do know.

The adult fly seems to be harmless. The adult fly is actually vegetarian. It feeds on flowers and, we think, decomposing fruits. Baby flies, they're not vegetarian. They will, you know, suck blood. And what happens is that as soon as birds start laying eggs... Motherflies swoop in... And lay their eggs on the base of their nest. Sort of underneath the finch eggs. Once the eggs hatch...

the eggs hatch of the flies as well and the larvae. Wriggling little larvae will crawl out from the bottom of the nest, up the finches body

into its beak. And they go into the noses of the baby finches. And just start eating. You know, they basically feed on the blood of the baby birds. How did these little fly babies know? I mean, that's a very specific trip to take. Good question. We're still trying to figure that out. You know, we assume that it was carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide. From the breathing.

of the birds. Wow. Yeah. She's opening a box with some of the birds, the little pinzones, the finches. Oh, God. Piedad showed me this tiny little dead finch in this box. Wow, there's a little hole into the brain of this little finch.

Oh my god. Hueco en la espalda? They ate the whole back of this little finch. Wait, so how big a problem is this? Well, I talked to one scientist. Sonja Kleindorfer, I'm professor in animal behavior at Flinders University, South Australia. And she told me that researchers recently did a survey of finch nests. Four different species on two islands, and all research groups found about 95% mortality in the nest.

95% of the babies were dead? Yeah. And Arno told me... But even worse... So far we've found Vilonis on 13 islands.

The fly is spreading island to island. Is there any timescale we should worry about? Like, are these finches disappearing very fast, very slowly? Depends on the species. We have at least five species that are known to be facing extinction and another six in serious decline. These five species, does that mean that they may go extinct in the next five years, in the next 50 years? I hope not, but...

You know, we have the case of the mangrove finch. We have 60 to 80 individuals left. Wow. It's a race against time.

So, for starters, they put up all these traps. They took me outside, they showed me where the traps are. There's a trap hanging from a tree here. And you see them actually all over Santa Cruz, these bright yellow traps hanging from trees. And this is to control the fly population? No, no, they would need like millions of traps, every few feet to do that. This is just to grab a few flies, take them back to the lab, and study them so they can learn how to fight them.

Charlotte and Piedad's fantasy is that the flies use a pheromone to attract the opposite sex. It would be lovely if we could find something like that. Because if they could find that chemical, that love chemical that the flies use to attract each other, they could disrupt it, confuse the flies, and screw up their mating. Another...

That's a long-term dream we have.

If they're gonna release sterilized male flies into the wild, they have to be able to raise millions of these flies in the lab. And they're trying like crazy. She's showing me all of the larvas that hatched today. Piedad showed me four baby flies that had just hatched. And they're in these little cups. But she told me that these four flies will probably die.

because they always die. Right now, we have huge problems trying to reify lornis in captivity, which is ironic given, you know, how abundant it is in the wild. When I was there, Piedad told me that so far they had only successfully raised three, three adult flies. And you're saying they needed millions? Yeah. And meanwhile, the finch populations are just getting decimated.

Charlotte says that they're trying to respond. Ornithologists have started to notice some new behaviors. For instance, adult birds picking the larvae out of the nostrils of the baby birds. And what we're starting to see is that they're beginning to consume them. You mean eat the fly larva? Yeah, which 15 years ago they would never do. Back in the year 2000, Sonya and some colleagues tried feeding the finches some fly larvae. And if ever there were a look of disgust on a finch face, that was it.

So I think there's been a change. They're also seeing baby finches climbing up over each other, just struggling to get away from the larva on the bottom of the nest. And they'll even start standing on the nest rim just to avoid being eaten. But when I asked Charlotte what she makes of all of these changes, she said... I think probably too little too late.

But then Sonya told me something really surprising. Yeah, that was a very unexpected discovery. Takes a couple steps to get there, but just to set it up, back in 2000, she was on Floriana Island for the first time. I started studying Darwin's finches. In particular, three tree finch species, the small, the medium, and the large.

And we went out and we set up our mist nets and we caught the birds and we measured them. And the thing to know is that even though these are our three different species, they're actually really hard to tell apart visually. So she would end up relying on their songs, their mating calls. Yep. Do you remember the song types? Could you whistle them for me? Oh, yes. It's a very simple song. The small tree finch goes something like, ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.

That's a small tree finch. And the medium tree finch is just a bit slower. For the medium, it's a ch-ch-ch-ch. For the large, ch-ch-ch-ch.

Wow, it's like a soprano saxophone and an alto and a tenor or something like that. That's right. So we just, you know, sat in the forest and we would always quiz each other. What's that? What's that? And we all agreed. Because the calls are really distinct. Easy to tell apart. But the interesting thing was from year to year, it got more difficult. Sony says each time she'd go into the field, the song sounded like they were starting to blur together. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.

Then when I showed up after a few years again, I was truly even more perplexed. She thought, God, why can't I tell these finches apart? It was very confusing. Am I losing my touch? But that shouldn't really happen. You should actually get better with experience, not worse. And that's where I thought, oh, something's changed in the system.

So, Sonya and her team rounded up some of the birds they tagged, got some DNA, made some recordings, brought all this stuff into the lab, and had this terrible realization that the large tree finch is now extinct. Totally gone from the island.

So you really only had two species left. You had the small tree finches and the medium tree finches. And based on that genetic data, the small tree finches not doing great, but compared to the medium tree finches, they are because the medium tree finches were on the brink of extinction. Like the large ones. Yeah. But then she sees something amazing in that genetic data.

She sees a small group of birds who have mixed up genes. A hybrid cluster. Some genes from the small tree finches and some from the medium tree finches.

What does that mean? Well, it means that these two different finches had started having babies together, which should never actually happen because these are totally separate species. That's really the classical definition of a species. It's like a biological rule about who you're not going to make a baby with. So they choose not to breed, even if they could. For, who knows, maybe a million years, the medium tree finch has patrolled that boundary.

I've got my thing over here and you've got your thing over there. But then along come the flies. And all of a sudden, like over maybe 20 years, these medium tree finches, they start to break their own biggest rule and they start to mate outside of their own kind.

And these hybrid finches, are they doing better against flies? Well, there's a couple clues that say maybe. Yeah. For example, when you look in the nests... They seem to have fewer parasites. And they seem to have more babies that survive. 15%. Wow. Whereas the numbers were very small for the medium tree finch and smaller for the small tree finch. Wow. I dare say that sounds kind of hopeful. It does. Yeah. Now...

The jury is still very much out on what will happen. But if the hybrids do have a fitness advantage, and if they survive, we may be witnessing in hyperspeed the creation of an entirely new species. It would possibly be one of the first vertebrate examples of speciation in real time that we can observe. So, tucked into the story of these finches is the story of Galapagos.

Same exact story that Darwin saw, these processes that he described, that just never, ever stop. It's this unending struggle. ... ... ... ... ... ...

Well, nasty.

My last night there, I went to meet up with that guy, Leonidas, who was running for mayor. I met him at this pizza place. The election had happened the night before. And did he win? No, Buccelli, the incumbent, won. So we go outside, chat. My name is Leonidas Parrales. I was running as a mayor. Turns out he speaks some English. So, you know, we do this interview in English. And I'm almost embarrassed that I wanted to talk to him because I think the dude is just going to be so down and out. Ha, ha, ha, ha.

Exactly the opposite. He was so joyful. To have lost? That's what I thought. You're not sad? You're not sad? I know, never friend. And he's like, friend, this is a field of four. The other three all have money behind them and you see their flags all over Santa Cruz. I just came in second. What?

The guy who wins, he spent $500,000. I spent, what, two grand? Friend, it's the beginning. It's the beginning of a new future for the Galapagos Islanders.

We are ascending. And we keep, we have our dreams up. So nature has a voice now. The sea lion has a voice in us. The tortoise has a voice in us. The penguin and everyone. So something is happening. That's exactly how he sees it. So thank you very much for the interview. I hope you enjoyed the Galapagos Island. It's a question of what he brought.

Producer Tim Howard.

And before we close, very special thanks to Matthew Judas Kilty, without whom Tim would have been crushed just by the sheer amount of tape that he gathered. Indeed. Also thanks to Dylan Keefe for original music. Thanks to Trish Dolman and Screen Siren Pictures, Alex Galifant, Matthias Espinosa, the naturalist guide from the first chapter, who wrote this song, Pico Pinzon. He's also a well-known musician in Canto.

Galapagos, it turns out. Thanks to the Galapagos National Park, Charles Darwin Foundation, Island Conservation, and the Galapagos Conservancy.

I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolowicz. Thanks for listening. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Willer. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nyanasambandham,

Matt Kilty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khary, Anna Raskuit-Paz, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Bowen Wong. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Adam Sibyl.

Hi, I'm Erica Inyankers. Leadership support for Radiolab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.