PINTA ISLAND, THE GALAPAGOS -- The giant tortoise is the most recognized symbol of the Galapagos Islands. But sadly, their numbers are dwindling.
He's the world's most famous tortoise. Seen by hundreds of thousands of Galapagos visitors. “Lonesome George” - so named because when he was rescued from Pinta Island in 1972 there were no more tortoises here. None.
Blame man for the extinction. Over centuries, sailors and pirates hauled tortoises away to eat them. More recently, humans introduced goats to the Galapagos as another source of food.
On some of the islands, the goats multiplied like crazy, and devoured the same plants the tortoises eat, denuding the hillsides.
Jack Nelson, a longtime Galapagos resident, remembers what it was like on Pinta. "There must have been a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand goats on the island."
Until the Galapagos national park eradicated the goats, slaughtering them, which paved the way for what a team of Galapagos park officials and American scientists call the re-tortoise-ing of Pinta. 39 of the creatures, fitted with radio tracking devices, brought here by boat from the tortoise breeding center on Santa Cruz island.
Two dozen park rangers carried the tortoises, weighing as much as 200 pounds, up a steep rock-strewn hillside to their new home.
"By returning tortoises to Pinta, we reestablish a population of habitat engineers, the natural habitat engineers of Galapagos" said Linda Cayot, a Galapagos conservancy science advisor.
The idea is the tortoises will restore the balance of nature by controlling the vegetation without destroying it.
A team of students from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse will camp out with the tortoises for ten weeks, monitoring their movements.
"It's a very special experience. We feel very lucky to be here at all and spend time here. It's a real gift," said Elizabeth Hunter, a SUNY-ESF graduate student.
Back at the breeding center, efforts to get Lonesome George to father more Pinta tortoises have not worked as he's turned out to be more of a dud than a stud. Plan "B" is to create a colony on Pinta with tortoises genetically similar to George.
So the 39 non-native tortoises transplanted there so far have been sterilized to prevent cross-breeding. The scientific team hopes these tortoises will have a long term impact because they live to an age of 150 or two hundred.
Their work of restoring the island will take centuries. But as we all learned from the fable of the tortoise and the hare, slow and steady wins the race.
Courtesy: NBC News
