Posts Tagged ‘Santa Cruz Island’

May
31

Dr Joe’s Giant Tortoise Adventure: Back on Santa Cruz Island

Posted by in Animal Info,Conservation,Dr Joe's Giant Tortoise Adventure,Endangered,Reptiles,Tortoise

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

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May
19

Dr. Joe’s Giant Tortoise Adventure: All Systems Go

Posted by in Animal Info,Dr Joe's Giant Tortoise Adventure,Endangered,Reptiles,Tortoise

May 14, Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos

Today is Friday.  I missed most of yesterday due to a severe case of food poisoning.  I had a light breakfast, then started having severe “symptoms.”  Then a bad fever put me in bed by 2:30 PM.  I’m just now catching up on writing about what’s happened since my last post.

I’m very fortunate to have a friend who works in the Charles Darwin Foundation here in Galapagos.  She was able to provide me access to the lab space which was not currently being used, and which was air conditioned — a real plus when trying to operate sensitive equipment!

Tuesday night I worked until about 10:30 PM in the lab trying to get the 25 samples we collected that day processed.  Blood is very fragile, and results are less trustworthy the longer it’s been since the sample is collected.  I haven’t put all the data into a spreadsheet yet, but the numbers that were generated seem to fall in line with normal values from other species.

Dr. Joe processes tortoise blood samples on site.

On Wednesday I did fecal examinations for parasites.  Only a few animals showed any signs of parasites in their stool, and of those the parasites were small in number.  I expect the de-worming we administered when we processed the animals on Monday and Tuesday worked.  I did a little bit of cleaning up and ended the day at 6:30 PM.

Today I started out slowly, as I’m still on the road to recovery from my short-term illness… but, it was the day to get all our equipment into quarantine.  Any equipment or supplies going to the outer, unpopulated islands is inspected for seeds and insects, sprayed with insecticide, and the placed into a freezer for 3 days to kill off anything that may have been missed.  The goal is to avoid spreading any plant or animal life from one island to the next, so that each island stays as close to its pristine state as possible.  Everything that goes to the island goes through the quarantine process.  All the food that the students will use in the next 2.5 months, all camping gear, all clothes, everything.

After getting our gear into quarantine, we had a meeting in the Park conference room.  All the guardaparques (or, park rangers) who will be going were there to get a briefing on the project.  This is project is a big one, so people were brought in from offices on all the other populated islands (Floreana, San Cristobal, Isabela) as well as from here on Santa Cruz Island.

When we arrive on Pinta Island, it will be very exciting.  It’ ll have been a long, winding road to get there…  Flying  five + hours from Houston to get to Quito, Ecuador by direct flight, where I stayed overnight and in the morning took a two hour Flight to Baltra Island, after which I took a bus to a ferry to a bus to a truck to the Galapogos National Park offices here in Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos.  Now Sunday night at 6 we leave for Pinta Island by boat.  We should arrive just before 6 AM on Monday morning.  There are no flights, no roads, no nothing on Pinta, not even tortoises…. Yet!

While on Pinta Island, Dr. Joe will have very limited communication with the outside world, so we probably won’t get an update until he returns to Santa Cruz.  Please check back in a few days to continue this journey with him!

Written by Dr. Joe Flannagan

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May
16

Dr. Joe’s Giant Tortoise Adventure Ramps Up

Posted by in Animal Info,Conservation,Dr Joe's Giant Tortoise Adventure,Endangered,Reptiles,Tortoise

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.

An example of a satellite tag

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!

Administering critical de-worming medicine.

* 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.

Students working with Dr. Joe apply a tracking device to the tortoise's shell with epoxy.

* 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.

A Darwin finch

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.

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May
10

Dr. Joe’s Giant Tortoise Adventure

Posted by in Conservation,Dr Joe's Giant Tortoise Adventure,Reptiles,Tortoise

As you might have read a few days ago, the Houston Zoo’s  Dr. Joe Flanagan has left for the Galapagos — specifically Pinta Island — to release 39 hybrid (but sterilized) Galapagos giant tortoises there. If you missed it, you can CLICK HERE to read all about it in the first of what will be many posts, sent from the  field over the next several weeks.  Here, we learn more about his mission and the giant tortoises.

Hybrid tortoises are the offspring of animals that were brought to the Charles Darwin Research Station (located in Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos) back in the early 1960s. At that time, it was unknown which island the individual tortoises had come from as they were  formerly pets that came to them from many places throughout Ecuador.  When eggs were laid, they were hatched and reared in order to develop the needed skills in tortoise husbandry that the CDRS and Galapagos National Park (GNP) would use in restoring tortoise populations on other islands.  Breeding in this group was halted in the mid 1970s, but the CDRS and GNP were left with a fair number of large animals that would need to be fed and cared for over the next 100 years!

A man named Wacho Tapia was working on an idea that would help restore Pinta Island’s habitat, and at the same time, reduce the amount of resources they had to invest in caring for those long-living giant tortoises.  In November 2008, Wacho asked me, “Is it possible to sterilize giant tortoises?”   The answer was yes.  So last fall, I went to Galapagos with 2 great friends, and outstanding reptile surgeons, Steve Divers (University of Georgia), and Sam Rivera (Zoo Atlanta) to perform the surgeries to sterilize these 39 animals.  Steve brought along a resident, Emi Knafo, and vet student Jason Norman to help with the procedures and to take advantage of this unique learning opportunity.  We did all the surgeries in a busy week of learning and fun, staying busy with the tortoises from dawn til dusk. In the evenings we worked on our plans for the following days.  As a group, we learned a lot from each other and from the project that was beginning to evolve.

We don’t want these tortoises to reproduce on Pinta because we still hope that some day a pure strain of tortoises can be released there to re-populate the habitat with the most appropriate inhabitants.  If we later introduce fertile animals, we don’t want them to interbreed with the hybrid tortoises.  So, now we have to be confident that none of the animals we transfer to Pinta at this time can breed.  We also have to assure that they are not carrying any seed from plants that don’t belong on Pinta, and that they are free of parasites that wouldn’t be native to Pinta.  For the past 2 months, “our” tortoises have been held in isolation pens and fed a diet lacking seeds.  Their pens have been cleaned regularly to prevent the ingestion of any of the native vegetation from Santa Cruz Island.  We’ve also administered antiparasitic medication to each animal twice.  When I go down there next week, each animal will get an additional treatment to assure they are parasite free. and we can move on to the next step in the project to release them on Pinta Island.
Please check back tomorrow for another installment from Dr. Joe’s Giant Tortoise Adventure!

Written by Dr. Joe Flanagan

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May
06

Dr. Joe’s Giant Tortoise Adventure

Posted by in Conservation,Dr Joe's Giant Tortoise Adventure,Endangered,Reptiles,Tortoise

Our Houston Zoo Head Veterinarian, Dr. Joe Flanagan, is about to embark on a ground breaking journey to the Galapagos.  And he’s giving us the opportunity to essentially go “with” him as he blogs and sends back pictures  along the way.   He’s on a mission and it begins today. Read all about it:

I have had the good fortune to be able to work periodically in the Galapagos for almost 20 years.  During that time, I’ve worked with some amazing scientists, and even more amazing animals and habitats.  Next week, I leave for a project which has been in the works for a very long time.  In a nutshell, we will be releasing 39 hybrid (but sterilized) Galapagos giant tortoises onto Pinta Island in the northern part of the archipelago.

These animals will be the first tortoises to set foot on Pinta since 1972 when “Lonesome George” was taken from Pinta to the Charles Darwin Research Center in Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos.  Before George was first seen in 1971, his “race” (actually now considered a species) was thought to be extinct.  George now stands as the symbol for species extinction as there has not yet been a mate found for him.

George is still in Puerto Ayora.  He’s cared for in the tortoise rearing center (Fausto Llerena Centro de Crianza) run by the Galapagos National Park,  housed with 2 females from Wolf Volcano on the nearby island of Isabela.  It was thought that these were the most closely related form of Galapagos tortoise, and there were hopes that George would mate with them, producing young that could one day re-populate his home island.  Unfortunately, despite a few clutches of eggs being found in the past few years, none have proven fertile –  and the hopes of finding a female tortoise from Pinta are getting to be more unlikely.

Pinta Island however, needs a tortoise population.  Goats had been introduced at one time resulting in thousands of goats building up, and denuding the island of native vegetation.  That very vegetation was essential for the survival of other species of native wildlife.

The Galapagos National Park was successful at removing goats from the island, finishing the job in 2003.  So now, there is no herbivore in the ecosystem and the vegetation is forming a climax scrub forest — which is the opposite.  This is almost as bad as having too many goats eating everything in sight.

To have a natural balance, there has to be a habitat engineer that eats vegetation, and moves through the environment spreading packets of seeds and fertilizer (commonly called feces).  If present, a tortoise population would help maintain a mosaic of plant communities that would support a diverse population of wildlife.  And Pinta would be just a little bit closer to being restored to the condition it was in when these islands were discovered in 1535.

Right now, I’m receiving equipment loaned to us for use in assessing the health of these animals prior to their release.  Chuck Boland (a friend and a supplier of ultrasound equipment to zoos around the country) has generously loaned us a Sonosite 180 portable (battery operated) ultrasound machine.  And Abaxis, manufacturer of blood chemistry analyzers, has loaned me equipment to assure the animals have normal organ function and are ready for the transition to the wild.

So, next week I’ll be packing everything together as I get ready to fly to Quito on the first leg of the trip to Galapagos!  I intend to report back regularly via this blog, essentially taking you with me.  So please join the tortoises and I on this great and important adventure.
Note — This post begins what promises to be a fascinating and informative read over the weeks to come.  Dr. Joe will be sending us regular installments throughout his trip. Please check back regularly!!

Written by Dr. Joe Flanagan

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