Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Marsha for Radio I. To day I
Speaker 1: will be reading National Geographic magazine. It is September twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five, which is donated by the publisher as a reminder.
Speaker 1: Radio Eye is a reading service intended for people who
Speaker 1: are blind or have other disabilities that make it difficult
Speaker 1: to read printed material. Please join me now for the
Speaker 1: first article entitled The Dear Devils who keep Lagos Moving.
Speaker 1: In the Nigerian metropolis, motorcycle taxi drivers contend with harassment,
Speaker 1: chaotic streets and gnarly accidents, but without them, the city
Speaker 1: of twenty million would grind to a halt. This article
Speaker 1: by Alexis O Kiowo, the fabric of Lagos, Nigeria is
Speaker 1: delicately strung together. The mega city spills from the mainland
Speaker 1: onto several islands in a lagoon that brushes against the
Speaker 1: Atlantic Ocean. It covers an area of about thirteen hundred
Speaker 1: square miles, and many Lagusians navigate the sprawling landscape on
Speaker 1: the back of a motorcycle taxi or okada. Their dare
Speaker 1: devil drivers called riders, zigzag through congested streets, dodging potholes
Speaker 1: and pedestrians. As both rider and passenger, or in some
Speaker 1: cases multiple passengers try to stay upright and unharmed. Public
Speaker 1: transportation here can be inefficient and roads can be difficult
Speaker 1: to maneuver on foot. Okadas solve a crucial problem that
Speaker 1: the government has been unable to solve for years, says
Speaker 1: photographer and National Geographic Explorer Victor Adawale, who was born
Speaker 1: and raised in Lagos. Some see okadas as a menace.
Speaker 1: Local officials claim riders are responsible for a large portion
Speaker 1: of Lagos traffic accidents and robberies are often committed by
Speaker 1: people on motorcycles. To improve road safety, bureaucrats have banned
Speaker 1: commercial motorcycles from bridges, highways and many other parts of
Speaker 1: the city. In twenty nineteen, the government launched the Bus
Speaker 1: Reform Initiative, which has deployed hundreds of new buses along
Speaker 1: dozens of routes across the region. That hasn't decreased the
Speaker 1: population's appetite for okada's, which are still widely used to
Speaker 1: ferry commuters to neighborhoods that buses can't reach. Everybody you
Speaker 1: see on the streets is riding in defiance of the
Speaker 1: ban because they don't have another option. Otdawali says, Traditionally,
Speaker 1: the motorcycles have been the cheapest choice for passengers. Some
Speaker 1: rides cost the equivalent of less than a US dollar
Speaker 1: and have provided a reliable living for those who drive
Speaker 1: them in a city where wages can be hard to
Speaker 1: come by. I am still riding because my job as
Speaker 1: a mechanic is not bringing in the income I need
Speaker 1: on time, says Aluwafemei Ipadoda, a friend of Adawali's father,
Speaker 1: who has driven okadas for over twenty years to pay
Speaker 1: for his children's education. Fares are beginning to rise as
Speaker 1: riders factor in the risk of getting caught. Enforcement of
Speaker 1: the ban is uneven, but residents still operating okada's are
Speaker 1: vulnerable and face harassment from police, who frequently arrest riders
Speaker 1: and demand extortion payments in exchange for confiscated motorcycles. People
Speaker 1: pay as much as ninety thousand naira fifty seven dollars
Speaker 1: to get their motorcycle back. Otdawali says, Sometimes they don't
Speaker 1: get it back, sometimes they have to watch it get crushed.
Speaker 1: The government has impounded and destroyed thousands of Okada's, a
Speaker 1: devastating blow the motorcycles are expensive up to thirty three
Speaker 1: times the median annual salary in Lagos, and riders frequently
Speaker 1: buy them in installments. Riders haven't taken the ban lying down.
Speaker 1: Numerous protests have led to clashes with police, and at
Speaker 1: least one okada union has filed a lawsuit against the
Speaker 1: government seeking both a repeal of the banded and lost wages.
Speaker 1: Odawali's option of Okada's has changed over the years. When
Speaker 1: he was a boy, his father, who rode okadas for
Speaker 1: twenty five years, use the same bike to take the
Speaker 1: family to church on the market and to drop off
Speaker 1: Otdawali and his brother at school. His whole family rode
Speaker 1: on the back of the motorcycle, which was a marker
Speaker 1: of lower social class at the time. He felt ashamed
Speaker 1: it would get off the yokada a short distance from
Speaker 1: school so his classmates wouldn't see him, but that shame
Speaker 1: has now evolved into pride. As Otdawale has watched the
Speaker 1: writers navigate these new challenges, they refused to be erased
Speaker 1: from the city. Next resurrecting the Lost Tortoises of the
Speaker 1: Galopagus by Hannah Nordhaus, they thrilled sailors they inspired Darwin.
Speaker 1: Then by the mid nineteenth century, the iconic Florian Floriana
Speaker 1: tortoises were gone. Here's how a group of persistent scientists
Speaker 1: unlocked the secrets to bringing them back. In October eighteen twenty,
Speaker 1: the Nantucket whaling ship Essex laid anchor at a blue
Speaker 1: green harbor on the Galapagos Island off Floriana, more than
Speaker 1: six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador. The sailors
Speaker 1: rowed their whale boats ashore and followed paths trampled by
Speaker 1: ancient reptiles, through broken basalts and tangled thickets of salt
Speaker 1: bush and cactus. Keeping a sharp lookout, rowed cap'n Boy
Speaker 1: Thomas Nickerson for the objects of their search. They were
Speaker 1: hunting for Galopicus giant tortoises. The animals varied from island
Speaker 1: to island. Some had round domed carapaces, while others had
Speaker 1: shells that curved up at the front like Spanish riding saddles,
Speaker 1: but all could provide food for multiple sailors. When the
Speaker 1: whalers found a small turpin, they'd flip it over, tie
Speaker 1: canvas straps to each of the creature's legs, then hoist
Speaker 1: the tortoise under their backs like a knapsap. They'd tie
Speaker 1: the largest ones, some weighing more than five hundred pounds,
Speaker 1: by their legs, to long poles, hauling them two or
Speaker 1: three men per side, across sharp and uneven lava rocks
Speaker 1: and back to their ship. There they'd stack their captives
Speaker 1: upside down in the hold like nesting bowls. Tortoises could
Speaker 1: live up to a year without sustenance. They neither eat
Speaker 1: nor drank, nor is the least pains taken with them,
Speaker 1: wrote Owen Chase, the ship's first mate. They are strewed
Speaker 1: over the deck, thrown under foot, or packed away in
Speaker 1: the hold as suits convenience. Yessex took more than sixty
Speaker 1: of Floriana's tortoises, which had the curved shells known as saddlebacks,
Speaker 1: and were, Nicholson wrote, the most rich, flavored and delicious
Speaker 1: meat I have ever met with. Then the ship set
Speaker 1: off for the Pacific whaling grounds, where a month later
Speaker 1: it was rammed by a whale, a disaster that provided
Speaker 1: the inspiration for Herman Malville's Moby Dick. The sailors salvaged
Speaker 1: as many tortoises from the foundering ship as they could
Speaker 1: fit on their small whale boats, eating them and eventually
Speaker 1: each other on their ill fated voyage back to the
Speaker 1: South American mainland. The other tortoises sank with a ship
Speaker 1: or floated away. Yessex was far from alone in its
Speaker 1: plundering of Galopicus tortoises. When Charles Darwin arrived at Floriana
Speaker 1: in eighteen thirty five on the journey that would spark
Speaker 1: his theory of evolution, he heard of whaling vessel vessels
Speaker 1: taking as many as seven hundred tortoises on one visit.
Speaker 1: Their numbers have of course been greatly reduced in this island,
Speaker 1: he wrote. Historians estimate that between seventeen seventy four and
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty, passing ships took some one hundred thousand of
Speaker 1: the nearly three hundred thousand tortoises that lived on the
Speaker 1: islands when the Spanish arrived in fifteen thirty five, driving
Speaker 1: populations of all fifteen Galopicus tortoise species into steep decline
Speaker 1: and three to extinction. The Floriana tortoise, last seen in
Speaker 1: the eighteen fifties, was the first to disappear almost two
Speaker 1: centuries later, though the Floriana tortoise is said to become
Speaker 1: the first extinct Galopicus species to be returned to its
Speaker 1: ancestral home. The revival of these gigantic creatures arrives at
Speaker 1: a moment when the resurrection of dire wolves is making
Speaker 1: headlines and scientists are working to retrieve the genes of
Speaker 1: other long gone creatures like wooly mammos. But such prehistoric
Speaker 1: species would return to a world that has lived without
Speaker 1: them for millennia. The descendants of the Floriana tortoises, by contrast,
Speaker 1: will be re induced to the place where they once belonged,
Speaker 1: playing a critical role in an ecosystem that still desperately
Speaker 1: needs them. To accomplish that, a team of dedicated scientists
Speaker 1: has not only pushed the frontiers of genetic sequences sequencing
Speaker 1: to identify a species that had been hidden from plain view,
Speaker 1: but also traveled to remote corners of the archipelago and
Speaker 1: sorted through bones and shells from dusty archives to right
Speaker 1: one of the great wrongs of Galopogus history. This improbable
Speaker 1: scientific journey began in two thousand as a team of
Speaker 1: conservation scientists traped through the densely vegetated gullies at the
Speaker 1: base of the included Wolf Volcano on the northwest island
Speaker 1: of Isabella. They confirmed earlier observations that some of the
Speaker 1: tortoises there looked different. The animals had saddleback shells, a
Speaker 1: sign that they were a separate species from the more
Speaker 1: familiar domed ones. On the volcano's higher, wetter slopes, there
Speaker 1: were pockets of tortoises that looked out of place, remembers
Speaker 1: conservation biologist James Gibbs, a National Geographic explorer and leader
Speaker 1: of the Galopagus Conservancy, whose which works to protect and
Speaker 1: restore the archipelago's wild ecosystems. To learn more, Gibbs and
Speaker 1: the team took blood samples from every unusual looking tortoise
Speaker 1: they encountered, placing identification tags on as many as they could,
Speaker 1: and sent the specimens to their research partner at Ad
Speaker 1: del Gisa, Gizella Cocone, and a evolutionary biologist at Yale
Speaker 1: University and a National Geographic explorer. When she analyzed their DNA,
Speaker 1: she couldn't identify their genetic sequences. They didn't match those
Speaker 1: of any living tortoise species in her genetic database. Cacone
Speaker 1: was bewildered. I called them aliens, she says. We didn't
Speaker 1: know where they came from. The researchers considered the possibility
Speaker 1: that some of those aliens could have floated ashore from
Speaker 1: whaling ships like the Essex Banks Bay on the volcanoes
Speaker 1: Western Flank was the final Galopagus anchorage for many ships
Speaker 1: on their way to the whaling grounds, and sailors were
Speaker 1: known to sometimes throw their surplus overboard before setting sail.
Speaker 1: Some of those unwonted animals may have floated to shore
Speaker 1: and ascended the volcanoes Ragged Flank, living among the native
Speaker 1: tortoises and eventually breeding with them. The whalers were responsible
Speaker 1: for the loss of so many tortoises, killing and eating
Speaker 1: most and carrying a number back home as trophies or pets,
Speaker 1: but perhaps the scientists speculated they had also inadvertently insured
Speaker 1: the survival of the animal's genes. Only after several asis
Speaker 1: in genetic sequencing technology, with the group realized the sailors
Speaker 1: had provided important clues to revive us species. Scientists have
Speaker 1: been working to save the giant tortoises of the Galopogus
Speaker 1: since the middle of the twentieth century. When only a
Speaker 1: few thousand were left on the entire archipelago. The whalers
Speaker 1: were gone, but tortoises had continued to fall prey to
Speaker 1: the creatures they brought with them, rats, pig, dogs and
Speaker 1: ants that fed on eggs and hatchlings, and goats and
Speaker 1: donkeys that disrupted and devoured their food supply. Galopogus National
Speaker 1: Park officials knew they had to do something or risk
Speaker 1: losing entire species. Beginning in the nineteen sixties, conservation teams
Speaker 1: used the limited tools then available to save them. They
Speaker 1: started on Espanola Island, east of Floriana, where the population
Speaker 1: had been reduced to fourteen individuals. Between nineteen sixty four
Speaker 1: and nineteen seventy four, park officials moved all the tortoises
Speaker 1: from the island to the Charles Darwin Research Station at
Speaker 1: the park's headquarters on Santa Cruz Island, with the help
Speaker 1: of a strapping mail brought in from the San Diego
Speaker 1: Zoo that, according to records, had come from Espanola in
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties. They bred thousands of young after a
Speaker 1: laborious campaign to eradicate goats from the island. They then
Speaker 1: reintroduced the hatchlings, and today more than three thousand tortoises
Speaker 1: lived there. Park teams replicated that success on other islands
Speaker 1: as well, But despite those triumphs, there was one glaring disappointment,
Speaker 1: not finding a mate for the very last tortoise on
Speaker 1: Pinta Island north of Floriana. Scientists had rescued the animal,
Speaker 1: they named Lonesome George from his native island in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen seventies, transporting him to a quarrel at the
Speaker 1: park's research station in hopes of preventing a fourth species
Speaker 1: from going extinct. In the years that followed, they actiously
Speaker 1: searched for a partner. They first scoured Pinta with no look.
Speaker 1: Then they placed females of other species with saddle backed
Speaker 1: shells that resembled those of the Pinta in George's corral
Speaker 1: at the research center. When he showed no interest in breeding,
Speaker 1: they tried artificial insemination. The females did finally nest in
Speaker 1: George's corral, but the eggs were all infertile. By the
Speaker 1: early two thousands, the conservation icon was close to one
Speaker 1: hundred years old and time was running out for the species.
Speaker 1: At the same time, developments in genomes sequencing were allowing
Speaker 1: Cocone to expand her tool kit to identify the Wolf
Speaker 1: Volcano eid aliens. In two thousand and six, she used
Speaker 1: a new method of dnaal analysis to retest the samples.
Speaker 1: She made the astonishing discovery that the scientists had collected
Speaker 1: blood from a tortoise whose genes appeared to be fifty
Speaker 1: percent Pinta. Perhaps it wasn't too late for lonesome George,
Speaker 1: and they could find Pinta relatives on the island and
Speaker 1: save the species. Thrilled, she proposed that the park scent
Speaker 1: another expedition to the volcano. We said, we have to
Speaker 1: go back there. We need to find this animal. If
Speaker 1: there is one, there could be many more. Still trying
Speaker 1: to pinpoint the other strange Wolf Volcano genes, she also
Speaker 1: began to look more closely at the three species than
Speaker 1: believed to have gone extinct, the Santa Fe tortoise, the
Speaker 1: ferninad Fernandina tortoise, and the Floriana tortoise. Without the DNA
Speaker 1: of live animals to compare to the alien genes, the
Speaker 1: only cells available for sequencing were from old specimens carried
Speaker 1: across the ocean by whalers or scientific collectors. We went
Speaker 1: around to museums to collect samples of bone and skin,
Speaker 1: Cocona says. At the American Museum of Natural History they
Speaker 1: found bones of New York Naturalism had unearthed in nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty eight from lava caverns on Floriana deep chasms where
Speaker 1: some tortoises had tumbled and died. At Harvard University's Museum
Speaker 1: of Comparative Zoology, they found bones and shells in eighteen
Speaker 1: thirty four and eighteen seventy two. They were very porous,
Speaker 1: she says, gray looking crumbly and desiccated. Even so, she
Speaker 1: managed to scrape enough genetic material to obtain sequences of
Speaker 1: their DNA and booms. She says the alien tortoises were
Speaker 1: in the same clade ancestral grouping with Floriana. The saddlebacks
Speaker 1: were hybrids of the native Wolf Volcano domed species mixed
Speaker 1: with the long extinct Floriana saddleback species. The scientist's speculations
Speaker 1: had been correct. The whaler's castaways castaway tortoises had survived
Speaker 1: an inch or bread. In two thousand and eight, a
Speaker 1: large expedition returned to Wolf Volcano to collect more samples
Speaker 1: so the team could get a better idea of how
Speaker 1: many Floriana and Pinta tortoises were on the island, and
Speaker 1: searched for possible mates for George. Teams from the Park
Speaker 1: and the Galopagus Conservancy set up camps around Wolf Volcano
Speaker 1: and collected blood samples from sixteen hundred sixty seven tortoises,
Speaker 1: placing identification tags on each one. In her Yale lab,
Speaker 1: Cocone analyzed those samples against her expanded database and found
Speaker 1: seventeen tortoises with Pinta genes and eighty four with Floriana ancestry.
Speaker 1: Still hoping to find more pintas, the Park team embarked
Speaker 1: on the lengthy process of planning, permitting, and funding another
Speaker 1: expedition to the volcano with a helicopter and nets to
Speaker 1: allow them to retrieve those hybrids. But in June twenty twelve,
Speaker 1: lonesome George's keeper found him dead in his corral, end
Speaker 1: of his line, end of his species. Later under cropsy
Speaker 1: would reveal George had an anatomical problem with his sperm
Speaker 1: duct and was probably incapable of reproducing. As scientists relinquished
Speaker 1: the idea of saving the pinta species. They focused on
Speaker 1: the Floriana hybrids. People had given up hopes so long
Speaker 1: ago for the species. Explains Gibbs that it took some
Speaker 1: time for the researchers to understand the opportunity that these
Speaker 1: numerous living relics presented, But when they did, they realized, Wow,
Speaker 1: this is actually as significant as finding pinted tortoises on
Speaker 1: Wolf Volcano, says Gibbs. It was then that the conservation
Speaker 1: team began to consider a radical proposal, capturing and breeding
Speaker 1: the descendants of the species and repopulating Floriana, where the
Speaker 1: animals hadn't lived for more than one hundred and fifty years.
Speaker 1: Returning tortoises to Floriana wasn't important solely because scientists had
Speaker 1: found a lost species. It was also ecologically critical. Here
Speaker 1: in the galopagus, Darwin had observed that species were exquisitely
Speaker 1: adapted to their habitat. Only recently have ecologists begun to
Speaker 1: realize how exquisitely adapted habitats are to the creatures that
Speaker 1: live there. When the last tortoise disappeared from Floriana, the
Speaker 1: island's species suffered. Important native plants began to die off
Speaker 1: while populations of invasive pests, plants, and livestock exploded, eating
Speaker 1: or out competing native plants and animals. By the end
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century, the islands mocking birds, racer snakes,
Speaker 1: rails and hawks had disappeared. In the years that followed, finches,
Speaker 1: barn owls, lava gulls, and vermilion flycatchers went missing too.
Speaker 1: Ark officials hoped to mend the hole in the ecosystem
Speaker 1: the lost tortoises had left behind. Without giant herbivores, the
Speaker 1: balance of an island ecosystem can collapse, says Washington Waco Tapia,
Speaker 1: a biologist who has worked in galopagus conservation since the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties. Tortoises are ecosystem engineers, shaping vegetation as they
Speaker 1: move like bulldozers across the landscape. They flattened the ground
Speaker 1: and opened the land for small reptiles, ground nesting seabirds,
Speaker 1: and native plants, says Tapia. Keeping weeds at bay helping
Speaker 1: native cacti regenerate, spreading seeds with their dung in creating
Speaker 1: ponds and wallows that also harbor other species. Researchers knew
Speaker 1: that the animals had helped restore ecological balance on other islands.
Speaker 1: On Espanola, for example, scientists observed native grasses and cacti
Speaker 1: recovering along with the lazo liverts, lava liverts, and albatross
Speaker 1: that declined in the tortoise's absence. Where the giant reptiles
Speaker 1: have returned, ecosystems have flourished. This is a bit of
Speaker 1: a change of mind and restoration notes are turo Iszuriata Valerie,
Speaker 1: who until recently was the park's director. Today, conservation teams
Speaker 1: bring back missing animals with a focus on an extended ecosystem.
Speaker 1: Restoration scientists new knowledge of species genetics allows them to
Speaker 1: make certain they are breeding creatures that are truly suited
Speaker 1: to surviving there. The goal of all this work has
Speaker 1: never been to do de extinction or recreate the Floriana tortoise,
Speaker 1: says University of Newcastle conservation biologist Evelyn Jensen, a former
Speaker 1: postdoc of Kutchon's, because that's never been possible. Tortoises lived
Speaker 1: too long and take too much time to reproduce, and
Speaker 1: achieving something close to purity, she says, would be a
Speaker 1: five hundred year project. The goal instead is for the
Speaker 1: descendants of the extinct species to return, survive, and fulfill
Speaker 1: their ancestors' ecological role in their native habitat. But Floriana
Speaker 1: had changed dramatically since a native tortoise last roamed the island.
Speaker 1: Now there's a community of one hundred and fifty people there,
Speaker 1: along with their pets and livestock, and thousands of rats
Speaker 1: and feral cats that, if left alone, would eat eggs
Speaker 1: and hatchlings and compromise the species' ability to reproduce. Soon
Speaker 1: after setting their sights on the Floriana species, park officials
Speaker 1: began meeting with the island's residents to secure their approval
Speaker 1: for a plan to poison and trap the rats and cats.
Speaker 1: These invasive animals would need to be eradicated or strenuously
Speaker 1: suppressed to ensure tortoises would once again populate the island.
Speaker 1: As those negotiations moved forward, the park finally put preparations
Speaker 1: in place to send an expedition to retrieve the hybrids
Speaker 1: from the volcano in twenty fifteen. The scientists arrived just
Speaker 1: before the wet season, spreading out across the volcano, using
Speaker 1: machetes to push through the thick underbrush. You don't have
Speaker 1: shade water, says Tapia. There are ticks all over your body.
Speaker 1: It was a grueling landscape, which made the survival of
Speaker 1: these transplanted creatures all the more remarkable. When the rainfall began,
Speaker 1: the Enkanyata's ravines that flood during storms began to flow.
Speaker 1: We could hear tortoises crawling from all over to the waters,
Speaker 1: he says. Researchers gathered two or three at a time,
Speaker 1: then as the helicopter hovered overhead, they loaded them into
Speaker 1: a large net and dropped them onto cushioned beds of
Speaker 1: car tires on the ship's deck, stacking them up in
Speaker 1: the hall, much as the whalers had two centuries earlier.
Speaker 1: It looked like a Noah's Ark for tortoises. Kuchone says.
Speaker 1: At the end, the hull was full, and we'd put
Speaker 1: them everywhere on the sides. The team found thousands and
Speaker 1: thousands of tortoises on the secluded volcano, but Kuchone says,
Speaker 1: and collected thirty Floriana hybrids, but they couldn't bring them
Speaker 1: to Floriana yet. Instead, they would have to transport the
Speaker 1: animals to the National Park's breeding center on Santa Cruz
Speaker 1: Island in hopes of building a healthy population. Kuchone's scientific
Speaker 1: insights continued to guide the team after the expedition. Once
Speaker 1: the adults arrived at the research station, she analyzed their
Speaker 1: genes to create a stud book, a list of the
Speaker 1: individuals with high proportions of Floriana jeans. The objective was
Speaker 1: to match up the hybrids to both increase Floriana jenes
Speaker 1: in their offspring and protect their genetic diversity. If we
Speaker 1: release all identical individuals and a virus comes by, she says,
Speaker 1: they could be wiped out. When it came time to
Speaker 1: make them. The breeding team placed three hambras females with
Speaker 1: two MACHOs. Any more and the males would get into fights.
Speaker 1: The tennis ball sized eggs produced from those couplings, up
Speaker 1: to fifteen per clutch, hatched in incubators. The hatchlings, each
Speaker 1: about the size of the palm of your hand, then
Speaker 1: moved to age sordid corrals to mature until they were
Speaker 1: big enough to survive reintroduction at around five years old.
Speaker 1: All of the wolf tortoises offspring have proved to be
Speaker 1: incredibly fit and robust, says Gibbs. Today, six hundred Floriana
Speaker 1: hybrids live in the breeding center, and three hundred are
Speaker 1: old enough for reintroduction down a sandy path in the
Speaker 1: far reaches of the research station. Park, breeding director Freddy
Speaker 1: Villaba throws an armful of branches of Plorotilla and introduced
Speaker 1: tree with large, she shield shaped leaves into a shaddy,
Speaker 1: shady corral that contains one hundred forty one of the
Speaker 1: oldest and biggest Floriana hatchlings, each now nearly two feet
Speaker 1: long and ready to return to the island. They converge
Speaker 1: on their food, extending their long necks and hissing as
Speaker 1: they jockey for position, climbing over each other like monster
Speaker 1: trucks to get to the branches and soon reducing their
Speaker 1: breakfast to gray, desiccated stalks. Valaba calls this enclosure the
Speaker 1: choral de las iocas home of the Crazies. Kachone knows
Speaker 1: more about these young tortoises than was conceivable even a
Speaker 1: decade ago. She has now sequenced multiple genomes of all
Speaker 1: the living Galopocus tortoise species using nuclear DNA, the individual
Speaker 1: genetic manual that makes you who you are. As her
Speaker 1: colleague Evelyn Jensen, explains that in depth nuclear genome analysis
Speaker 1: has provided some additional surprises. Keachoni's early work had shown
Speaker 1: that the Wolf volcano aliens had a mix of Floriana,
Speaker 1: Isabella and Pinta ancestry, but after examining more museum specimens,
Speaker 1: Caconi and Jensen's Jensen realized that the wolf hybrids had
Speaker 1: less Pinta ancestry than they originally thought. Instead, the team
Speaker 1: found genes from Espanola tortoises. It's not just two species hybridizing,
Speaker 1: it can be three, or maybe even four, says Jensen.
Speaker 1: This is a good thing the scientists belief with complex ancestry,
Speaker 1: she adds, they're actually quite genetically diverse. What will happen
Speaker 1: next remains a scientific mystery. Perhaps the hybrids with the
Speaker 1: most native genes will flourish on Floriana, but the island
Speaker 1: is a different place now, a novel ecosystem, as the
Speaker 1: ecologists say, where native organisms mix with human introduced ones.
Speaker 1: The locosts will have to contend with thickets of invasive
Speaker 1: BlackBerry shrubs and lemon and guava trees brought by early
Speaker 1: human settlers, with scarcer stands of the cactus they love
Speaker 1: to eat, and a change in climate. Ecosystems don't stand still,
Speaker 1: either species or their genes. The team will put the
Speaker 1: tortoises on the island, saskatchone, then let natural selection take
Speaker 1: its course. Whatever survives will probably be best suited to live
Speaker 1: on the island. She says. Whatever survives will have some
Speaker 1: genes from Floriana to help the newcomers. The park and
Speaker 1: a local conservation group have over the past several years
Speaker 1: prepared a number of measurers to wipe out the invasive
Speaker 1: cats and rats that pose a risk to tortoises. At
Speaker 1: the end of twenty twenty three is the culmination of
Speaker 1: that effort. Two ultra light helicopters lifted above Floriana and
Speaker 1: scattered many thousands of blue kibble sized pellets of rat
Speaker 1: poison over areas unpopulated by people, while teams spread pellets
Speaker 1: by hand near homes and farms and set out traps
Speaker 1: and poisoned sausages to kill the cats. Park officials had
Speaker 1: planned to put the first tortoises on the island the
Speaker 1: following December, when the onset of the rainy season would
Speaker 1: ensure more food for the young reptiles, but the but
Speaker 1: camera traps found that forty or fifty rats had survived
Speaker 1: the poison, and they postponed the reintroductions. They now planned
Speaker 1: to release the tortoises when the rains begin to fall
Speaker 1: later next year. Even without full eradication, however, the ecosystem
Speaker 1: has begun to rebound with fewer cats and rats. Floriana cuckoos,
Speaker 1: mocking birds and doves have come back. Earlier this year,
Speaker 1: park workers heard the song of a gloagus rail, a
Speaker 1: bird last seen on the island in eighteen thirty five,
Speaker 1: a musical chi chi chi chru, not heard since the
Speaker 1: days of the whalers. When the locas finally go home,
Speaker 1: they'll travel by ship to a wharf in the small
Speaker 1: village of Puerta velasco Ibera, then in trucks to the
Speaker 1: east side of the island. As they approach the highlands,
Speaker 1: park rangers will complete the journey by strapping the animals
Speaker 1: weighing up to thirty pounds, onto their backs, much the
Speaker 1: same way those whalers carried away their forebeads. This concludes
Speaker 1: readings from National Geographic for to day. Your reader has
Speaker 1: been Marsha. Thank you for listening, Keep on listening and
Speaker 1: have a great day