The fifth installment from our Dr. Joe Flanagan. If you haven’t been reading along, just scroll down to his first post on May 6.
May 13, Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos
I am the luckiest guy in the world! I’ve spent the last 2 days working with 39 tortoises and have shared my time with some very professional students who will be following these animals for the next 2.5 months using radio tracking. I’ll be able to “watch” three of the animals from home since they’ll be wearing satellite tags. The tags are actually transmitters, whose signal is picked up by satellites and the information on their location is sent to a database where it is downloaded for access.
Below is the process I’ve gone through for the last 2 days:
* Each tortoise is brought from isolation pen, where all 39 animals have been kept since their sterilization surgery last November.
* The tortoise is weighed, measured, and identity is confirmed through markings and a “PIT” (passive induced transponder) tag.
* I collect a blood sample for later analysis. My favorite site for blood collection is the jugular vein. This is generally easy to utilize if the animal is held by someone strong enough while extracting the animal’s head from the shell, and keep it still while I locate the nice vein on either side of the neck. I don’t get the sample on the first try every time, but most of the time I do. Today there was one animal that WOULD NOT COOPERATE!! So I went to my second favorite site, which is the wrist area. That’s where it’s easiest to get blood from most animals, but it doesn’t flow as well, and can be contaminated with lymph fluid, making it less helpful in diagnosing disease. Once captured, the blood goes into storage tubes and into an ice chest to keep it cool until analyzed.
* I administer a de-wormer to assure they aren’t harboring any “animals” we don’t want to introduce to Pinta. This involves drawing up the correct amount of medicine for the tortoise, then teasing the blunt tipped metal tube through the front of the tortoises’ lips and advancing it into the back of their throat to administer the liquid slowly as they swallow. This goes well most of the time, but some seem to know how to store it in the back of their throats and can then spew it out when I’ve finished!
* I collect a fecal sample (if they are so generous) to assess the success of our treatment.
* The tortoise is then cleaned and prepared to have one of 3 different types of electronic tags attached. The students here with me are using an epoxy that’s been used before on turtles and tortoises. It starts out like putty, but becomes as hard as rock and adheres well to the tortoise’s shells. The whole process, other than the drying of the epoxy, takes about 30 minutes per animal.
* The tortoises then go into a holding pen where they’re fed and watered before they are carefully loaded onto ship this coming Sunday to take the voyage to Pinta Island.
I’m analyzing the blood samples with equipment loaned to the project by Abaxis. They have a pretty neat, small, and easy-to-operate machine that gives me information on the tortoise’s organ functions, including its’ kidney, liver, muscle, and circulatory system. The machine takes only a very small amount of blood and gives me a panel of information. I analyze their blood for 2 reasons: 1) we want to see that the animals are healthy before they’re released, and 2) we want to see a set of data that we can use to create normal reference ranges for blood values for this species. The numbers will be particularly important since these animals are kept within the natural range of the species.
As we work, it’s fun to look around at the coastal, arid zone of Santa Cruz Island, where the Charles Darwin Research Station and the Galapagos National Park offices are located. There’s a cactus forest in this area, with prickly pear and organ pipe like cactus that tower up to 30′ tall or more! There are also acacia, palo verde (just like in Texas) and many other species of trees and shrubs that remind me of home. But it is all growing in a rough, rocky, lava covered substrate that heaves and rolls from the coast to the top peak of this island. The lava is rough and the vegetation is thick.
I’m also enjoying watching the “Darwin’s Finches”, mockingbirds, and warblers that are very abundant. One species, the ani (or garrapatero in Spanish), is also abundant, but unfortunately was introduced many years ago by farmers. The name “garrapatero” means “tick eater”, so the farmers were hoping to relieve their cattle of these blood sucking parasites. The plan didn’t work, and these birds now compete with native birds, and even can eat the young of some of the other species of birds here. Additionally, we know they carry diseases like parasites and pox virus which are contagious to the other birds.
I hope to get done with the blood samples by 10 or 10:15 tonight. It has been a long day and I will probably miss supper. It will all be worth it for the important information we will be learning about these magnificent tortoises!
Written By Dr. Joe Flanagan
Thank you to eeliad.com for satellite tag photo, and to Blackwellpublishing.com for the picture of the Darwin finch.
