Stories tagged Galapagos Islands
The great race: Satellite technology is keeping tabs on the progress of 11 leatherback turtles as they migrate from Costa Rica to the Galapagos Islands in the Great Turtle Race.The Kentucky Derby is still a few weeks away, but there’s another big animal race taking place right now deep in the waters of the Pacific Ocean.
The Great Turtle Race started on Monday as 11 leatherback turtles left the shores of Costa Rica on their spring migration to the Galapagos Islands. They should complete the 1,200-mile journey within the next couple weeks. Satellite tracking equipment is strapped to each turtle and their progress is being monitored on the website www.greatturtlerace.com. The tracking information measures their progress toward the island and also how deep they’re diving into the ocean.
Leatherback turtles are an endangered species that some environmentalists fear could be wiped off the Earth in the next 10 years. The female populations of the turtles have dropped from 115,000 in 1980 to less than 43,000 today.
Tags : .gallery_thumbnail.jpg "Charles Darwin, c. 1881: Source: Wikipedia (Public Domain)")
Charles Darwin, c. 1881: Source: Wikipedia (Public Domain)A group of Galapagos Island birds known as Darwin’s Finches continue to do what they’re best known for: evolving. A recent study published in the the journal Science, details how new competition for food has resulted in some rather quick adaptations in the beaks of some of the famous finches that were instrumental in Charles Darwin formulating his theory of evolution.
 (WPcommons).gallery_thumbnail.jpg "Finch: US Fish and Wildlife photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons")
Finch: US Fish and Wildlife photo courtesy Wikimedia CommonsPeter Grant of Princeton University has been studying the finches for decades. Early on he noticed that a medium sized ground finch, Geospiza fortis, living on the Galapagos island of Daphne, faced no competition for food and ate both small and large seeds. Then, in 1982, competition arrived in the form of a larger ground finch, Geospiza magnirostris, setting in motion a classic case of microevolution.
The new species was able to break open the larger seeds of the Tribulus plants three times faster than G. fortis and soon depleted the island’s large seed supply.
Over the next twenty years the population of G. fortis finches with larger beaks declined dramatically due to the competition, leaving only a population of smaller beaked G. fortis which didn’t compete for the larger seeds favored by G. magnirostris.
What makes this unusual is that it’s given scientists a rare opportunity to actually observe first hand a change in an animal’s appearance caused by the arrival of a new food competitor.
SOURCES AND LINKS
Minneapolis Star Tribune story
Darwin’s Finches
More on Darwins’s Finches
Charles Darwin
The Galapagos Islands
Charles Darwin Foundation
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