May 21, Friday, back in Santa Cruz
Every time I come to Galapagos and have the opportunity to work with the professional staffs of either the Galapagos National Park or the Charles Darwin Research Station, I am thankful for my opportunity to work in this unique environment. I also thank the Spanish teachers I had from grade school in Omaha, NE to college at Iowa State in Ames, Iowa. At the time I had no idea how important that “elective” would be to my career. I sometimes think it was among the smartest things I’ve ever done.
That said, I frequently feel pretty good about my ability to speak Spanish. I can converse, listen, and even lecture almost as if it was my native tongue. Then, I can go to a different setting, sit with a different group of people, and not be able to make out word one of anything being said. Mostly this latter situation is when a bunch of native speakers get together and speak quickly, using slang, and proper names of people and/or places that aren’t familiar to me. They lose me quickly. Galapagos is generally a pretty easy place to get by with weak language skills. The people who have settled here over the years are American, German, French, Scandinavian, Ecuadorian, —you name it. So, most people on the street have the command of more than one language and are very forgiving when I butcher a sentence with bad vocabulary or grammar.
Now, today was a busy day. I’d been loaned a Sonosite Titan 180 ultrasound machine by Chuck Boland for use on the tortoises here. It’s a great machine, just like we use at the zoo, but we use ours so much there’s no way I could have brought it down for two and a half weeks. Chuck was nice enough to loan me this unit which is now on sale at the close out price of $10K. Really a nice deal, but I have one already. I think we’ll be in the market again in a few years for the “next” technology, and then I’ll be able to take this battery operated, fully portable machine anywhere!
Anyway, I wanted to examine a few animals at the tortoise rearing center in the Galapagos National Park facilities in Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos. I looked at 6 animals, observing heart, gonads, and kidneys with the ultrasound. Five were to establish reference information which I then applied to the images I got from Lonesome George. I was surprised with what I was able to see, as all were of a saddleback tortoise shape, making it a lot easier to access their soft tissues where ultrasound is most diagnostic. I also collected blood on these animals to use as additional reference “normals” which I can compare to the samples collected from the 39 animals now released on Pinta.
After spending my morning doing that, I offered my services to scan the remaining females in the Espanola tortoise breeding herd to see what their ovarian activity was. It looks like most have developed follicles, and are on track to start laying eggs in about a month. The Centro de Crianza (rearing center) has produced over 1500 of these Espanola tortoises for repatriation on Espanola Island since the program began in the 1970s.
The Park staff will be making some moves of animals in the near future so that their breeding efforts can continue to be successful and produce the greatest genetic diversity possible from this herd of 3 male and 12 female animals.
It’s not over yet! Come back to read about Dr. Joe’s last day in Galapagos… If you haven’t been following Dr. Joe’s Giant Tortoise Adventure, please scoll down to his first post on May 6.
Written by Dr. Joe Flanagan
