Industrial fishing boats hover menacingly on the edges of Ecuador's Galapagos Marine Reserve, where schools of multicolored fish and hammerhead sharks frolic in the protected Pacific waters.
Ecology
Mar 16, 2024
0
1
Greenpeace on Monday called for the creation of a high seas marine protected zone under a new UN treaty to secure a much wider area around Ecuador's famous Galapagos archipelago.
Ecology
Mar 11, 2024
0
32
Researchers with the University of Minnesota hope to release highly specialized parasitic wasps to serve as a biological control method to save Darwin's finches from a dire threat: the invasive avian vampire fly, Philornis ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 5, 2024
1
25
Human activities like land-use changes and urban development have huge ecosystem impacts. Since organisms are shaped by their surroundings, how do they adapt during these times of upheaval? Answering this question requires ...
Ecology
Nov 9, 2023
0
2
Cetaceans are the best-known fully aquatic animals, including whales, dolphins and porpoises. The group includes more than 90 existing species, divided into baleen whales (Mysticeti) and toothed whales (Odontoceti). Toothed ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 5, 2023
0
17
When Charles Darwin traveled to the Galapagos Islands almost 200 years ago as a gentleman naturalist, he used the power of observation to develop his theory that species evolve over time.
Plants & Animals
Sep 21, 2023
0
106
The Galapagos National Park said Tuesday that it had detected its first cases of avian flu on the remote islands, home to unique bird species that helped inspire the theory of evolution.
Ecology
Sep 20, 2023
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15
A schooner set sail Tuesday from the south coast of England to train and inspire a new generation of naturalists by retracing the voyage taken by a young Charles Darwin nearly 200 years ago that led to his theory of evolution.
Other
Aug 15, 2023
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3
In the story of Charles Darwin, there are two often-omitted footnotes: He was taught by a Black former enslaved man, John Edmonstone, and he was assisted in his groundbreaking research by a Black servant, Syms Covington.
Education
Jul 24, 2023
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19
Oceanic islands provide useful models for ecology, biogeography and evolutionary research. Many ground-breaking findings—including Darwin's theory of evolution—have emerged from the study of species on islands and their ...
Evolution
Jul 13, 2023
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1
The Galápagos Islands (official name: Archipiélago de Colón; other Spanish names: Islas de Colón or Islas Galápagos) are an archipelago of volcanic islands distributed around the equator in the Pacific Ocean, 972 km west of continental Ecuador. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site: wildlife is its most notable feature.
The Galápagos Islands form the Galápagos Province of Ecuador and are part of the country's national park system. The principal language on the islands is Spanish. The islands have a population of around 40,000, which is a 40-fold expansion in 50 years.
The islands are geologically young and famed for their vast number of endemic species, which were studied by Charles Darwin during the voyage of the Beagle. His observations and collections contributed to the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.
The first crude navigation chart of the islands was done by the buccaneer Ambrose Cowley in 1684. He named the individual islands after some of his fellow pirates or after the English noblemen who helped the privateer's cause. More recently, the Ecuadorian government gave most of the islands Spanish names. While the Spanish names are official, many users (especially ecological researchers) continue to use the older English names, particularly as those were the names used when Charles Darwin visited.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
