What Three Animals Did Darwin Study On The Galapagos Islands

Introduction

The most historic visitor to Galapagos was undoubtedly the young Charles Darwin in 1835 on lath HMS
Beagle, commanded by Captain Robert FitzRoy. The ship was homeward bound after spending 3 years charting the coasts of South America from the Rio Plata circular to Chiloe in southern Chile. In his travels ashore on the pampas of Argentina and in the Cordilleras of the Andes, collecting animals and fossils and studying the geology, Charles Darwin had been exposed to a wider range of phenomena than any previous scientist.

People, Charles Darwin

His innate qualities of enquiring critically with an open heed into the whys and wherefores of every one of his observations had given ascension to doubts in his mind about the correctness of the view of the Creation held at that time by most scientists equally well equally the Church, maintaining that all species were stock-still and unchanging. In Galapagos he found a remarkable population of plants, birds and reptiles that had adult in isolation from the mainland, but frequently differed on almost identical islands adjacent door to one another and whose characteristics he could just explain by a gradual transformation of the various species.

On the Origin of Species

Presently after his return to England in 1836, Charles Darwin arrived at the principle of 'natural choice' as a mechanism for On the origin of species the creation of new species, just for the next twenty years he kept his ideas strictly to himself, Charles Lyell, and Joseph Hooker, while he patiently clustered prove in their support. On 1 July 1858, in response to a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace who had come up with a virtually identical theory, though with less supporting evidence, the joint Darwin-Wallace papers were presented in outline to the Linnean Society of London. Darwin and so settled downwards to write a fuller account of his theory and On the Origin of Species was released to the booksellers on 24 November 1859. Although his ideas were soon accepted by the bulk of scientists, the challenge that they offered to the Church and to the balance of society took longer to brand its mark, but their importance in obliging mankind to accept a radically fresh view of itself has long since been universally recognised.

Helm Fitzroy of the Beagle

The events that led to Darwin's recruitment to sail on HMS Beagle were somewhat bizarre. When in 1830 Helm FitzRoy was commanding the transport on the first of her two survey voyages, he had trouble in Tierra del Fuego because of the tendency of the local people to steal everything on which they could lay their hands. He tried to curb their thieving by taking some hostages, but they preferred memory of their booty to the release of their comrades. He was left with iv Fuegians on his hands and conceived the notion of taking them dorsum to England to exist educated and later returned to Tierra del Fuego to laissez passer on the benefits of civilisation to their people. The Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty were not very sympathetic with his philanthropic proposals, simply eventually succumbed to force per unit area from his influential relatives and re-appointed him to the control of the ship in 1831 so that he could both complete the survey and repatriate his Fuegians. Fitzroy had recorded in 1830 that if he went out again he would like to have a geologist with him to examine the country while he and his officers looked after the hydrography. He asked his friends at Cambridge Academy to suggest a suitable person for this mail service and they came up with the name of Charles Darwin, who had just graduated in theology only was considered to have much promise both in geology and in natural history. After Charles' father had been persuaded that the trip would not be unsuitable to his chosen profession every bit a clergyman, he was interviewed by Fitzroy and accepted as his companion to serve as the Beagle'southward geologist and naturalist.

Darwin in Galapagos

At final on the way back to England after repatriating the Fuegians and devoting three years to Fitzroy'due south survey of the coasts of Argentina and Republic of chile, the Beagle arrived in the Galapagos Islands on 15 September 1835. The adjacent mean solar day, Darwin landed on the western end of Chatham Island, now known as San Cristobal. He was not very favourably impressed by its appearance, and wrote in his diary; "The black rocks heated by the rays of the vertical sunday like a stove, give to the air a close & sultry feeling. The plants as well scent unpleasantly. The country was compared to what we might imagine the cultivated parts of the Infernal regions to be." The marine iguanas that were mutual along the shores of all the islands were "hideous-looking creatures, of a muddy blackness colour, stupid and sluggish in their movements", only in the h2o they swam "with perfect ease and swiftness". He soon found how extraordinarily tame the birds were and recorded that "I pushed off a branch with the finish of my gun, a large hawk".

The Giant Tortoises

Charles Darwin's opinion of the fauna rose further when he met his first behemothic tortoises, striding along "wide and well beaten tracks" to drink at their watering places. When on 24 September the Beagle moved on to Charles Isle (now known as Floreana), he met the English Governor, Nicholas Lawson, who claimed that he could "pronounce with certainty from which island any tortoise had been brought" from the shape of its shell. However, the possible implications of this remark did non strike Darwin until later and he failed to collect any of the tortoise carapaces in the islands he visited. Like everyone else at that time, the crew of the Beagle regarded the tortoises just as an inexhaustible source of food and some 50 tortoises were captured past hunting parties on San Cristobal. But they were all eaten during the journey dwelling and the shells were not preserved for science.

The Concluding Isle Visits

Adjacent they visited Albemarle (now Isabela), where Darwin outset saw land iguanas, which "are hideous animals, but are considered good food". On eight October, Darwin was left with a modest party on James Island (Santiago) where they camped at Buccaneer Cove for nine days, explored the highlands, saw many tortoises and collected a variety of birds. On 18 October, having completed the survey of Isabela, the Beagle picked upward some members of the crew who had been surveying Abingdon (Pinta) and sailed abroad northwards past Culpepper and Wenman Islands, bound for Tahiti. TheBeagle had spent just v weeks in Galapagos waters, but Darwin's presence on board ensured that Galapagos would occupy a special place in the history of science.

The Function of Galapagos

In the opening judgement of On the Origin of Species, Darwin affirmed that his observations when on board HMS Beagle had played a vital part in the development of his theories. Nevertheless, the idea that he was struck by a blinding flash of inspiration upon start landing in Galapagos and seeing the finches that came to conduct his name is far from the truth. It is articulate from his notes that he connected for some nine months subsequently visiting Galapagos to believe in the fixity of species and his earliest doubts about the correctness of this doctrine, written effectually one July 1836 on the last leg of the journey, were based on the mockingbirds that he had collected, non the finches. It was only in March 1837 that the penny dropped, when the ornithologist John Gould reported to him that the finches were not, as he had supposed, members of several widely dissimilar families, only all belonged to 1 remarkable new family now known every bit the Geospizinae. It then became clear that Darwin had mixed upward some of his specimens and had not recorded with his usual care exactly where all of them had been nerveless, so that he was obliged to seek assistance from those of his shipmates who had also shot some finches. The resulting collection, now lodged at the Natural History Museum in London, has been described as a taxonomist'southward nightmare. Nevertheless, the mode in which members of this family of birds had evolved to fill up several distinctly different ecological niches has been fully confirmed by later workers and recent studies in Galapagos on the beaks of the finches have provided striking new evidence on the functioning of natural selection in real time.

Conservation in Galapagos

The concept of conservation had however to exist built-in in 1835 and as has been seen, Charles Darwin behaved as all his predecessors did and departed with a large load of tortoises. Simply within x years the tortoises were extinct on Floreana Island, partly because of heavy depredations by visiting ships and partly considering the tortoises were losing out through competition with the goats that had been introduced and the destruction of their eggs and immature by dogs and rats. He would have been the first to capeesh the vital importance of protecting the fauna and flora from feral competitors if the Enchanted Isles were to remain as he found them.