Ep. 05: The Galapagoats Islands

The story of how feral goats nearly destroyed the Galápagos Islands | For centuries, goats in the Galapagos were a living pantry, released on islands by pirates and whalers who needed a reliable food source waiting for them when they returned. When permanent settlers arrived in the late 1800s and started releasing them by the hundreds, they became a catastrophe. By the late 20th century, 250,000 feral goats were stripping the archipelago bare—destroying the cactus forests, collapsing the soil, and pushing the famous giant tortoises toward extinction.

What followed was one of the most ambitious conservation campaigns ever attempted: 9 years, $10.5 million, 150,000 goats killed, and a technique called the Judas Goat that turned the animals' own social instincts against them.

This is the story of how the Galápagos Islands nearly lost everything.

Transcript

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When Fausto Yorena arrived at the enclosure on the morning of june twenty fourth, twenty twelve, the first thing he noticed was the stillness. George wasn't at the gate. Every morning for forty years, George had met him there with his neck outstretched, the same ritual, repeated more than 14,000 times, that had bonded the two of them across four decades. But that morning, George didn't show up to greet his friend. Fausto eventually found him, lying on his side in the volcanic dirt, neck stretched in the direction of his watering hole, motionless among the prickly pear cactus and the pale Palo Santo trees that shaded his corral. George was a Pinta Island giant tortoise, and Fausto had cared for him since 1972, when he was brought to the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island in the Galapagos Islands in the hopes of saving his species. Everyone who knew him, and by the end, many people did, called him Lonesome George. George was the last known Pinta Island tortoise, the last living member of the subspecies Chelenoides abingdoniae. A subspecies is a distinct population within a species, one that has been geographically cut off from other members of its species for so long that it develops its own physical characteristics and behaviors. When George died that morning, near the age of 100, his subspecies became extinct after plodding across Pinta Island for possibly more than a million years. It survived volcanic eruptions, ice ages, sea level changes, and even the arrival of pirates and whalers who ate tortoises by the tens of thousands. By the mid-20th century, George's subspecies seemed to have survived the worst. But what came next would change everything, touching nearly every island and every subspecies of Galapagos giant tortoise. It was the one thing evolution could never have prepared them for. Goats. The pirates and whalers had brought goats, small numbers, released as living food sources for future voyages. Those early populations stayed manageable, hunted down by passing ships and struggling to spread across unfamiliar terrain. But when permanent settlers arrived in the late 1800s and early 1900s, they came with ranching in mind, releasing hundreds of goats at a time. And goats, with no natural predators, did what goats do. They ate and they multiplied. Dozens became hundreds, hundreds became thousands, then hundreds of thousands. They didn't just graze, they stripped the landscapes bare, destroying the cactus forests and shrublands that tortoises, land iguanas, and the island's endemic birds had relied on for millions of years. George's island, Pinta, a small volcanic cone in the northern Galapagos, was no exception. Just a few dozen goats, introduced in 1959 by fishermen who wanted a food source, had within a decade consumed every plant, every seedling, and every blade of vegetation. The island that had sustained tortoises for a million years had been stripped to bare volcanic rock. By the early 20th century, the pinza tortoise was, as far as anyone knew, extinct. Then, in 1971, a Hungarian scientist named Josef Vaguldi was conducting field work on the island when he spotted something moving slowly through the scrub, a single giant tortoise. George. Researchers confirmed that he was the last surviving member of a subspecies they had already given up on. He was estimated to be around 60 years old, which meant he had almost certainly spent decades wandering that devastated island without ever encountering another tortoise. Across the Galapagos archipelago, the picture was similar. In 1997, when the Galapagos National Park and the Charles Darwin Foundation gathered international experts to assess the situation, they estimated that 250,000 feral goats occupied the islands. On the northern half of Isabella Island alone, 100,000 goats were stripping a landscape that had taken millions of years to create. What followed was one of the most ambitious ecosystem restoration campaigns in history. It cost $10.5 million and required helicopters, sharpshooters, radio callers, and something called Judas goats. More to come on that. This is the story of how the Galapagos Islands nearly lost everything and how they fought their way back. Each episode investigates a moment when human activity collided with the natural world and follows what happened next and who was left to deal with it. In the eastern Pacific Ocean, 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, the equator cuts directly through an archipelago of 13 major islands, dozens of smaller ones, and more than 100 rocks and islets, the Galapagos Islands. The Western Islands are among the most volcanically active places on Earth, sitting directly above a mantle plume, a column of superheated rock that punches up through the Nazca tectonic plate. As the plate slowly drifts eastward, it carries all the islands with it, but the westernmost islands are still passing directly over the heat source, while the eastern ones have long since moved away from it. The eastern islands are more than four million years old. The western islands, some of which are less than a million years old, are geological newborns. La Cumbre, the volcano on Fernandina, the youngest island in the far west, erupts on average every four to five years and has resurfaced the entire island with fresh lava within the last 5,000 years. None of these islands were ever part of a continent. They rose directly from the deep ocean floor, barren and lifeless. No soil, seeds, or shade, just black volcanic rock baking in the equatorial sun, surrounded by open ocean in every direction. Everything living in the Galapagos today arrived from somewhere else. A finch blown off course in a storm, a seed carried in a bird's stomach across 600 miles of open ocean, an iguana that crossed on a raft of vegetation. A giant tortoise, perhaps floating on its own buoyancy, drifting from the mainland. Whatever survived that crossing and managed to establish itself on land, in most cases, had the island entirely to itself. No competitors and no predators, countless ecological niches open to those adaptable enough to take them. Under those conditions, evolution gets really weird. Birds lose the ability to fly, as there's no reason to fly if there's nothing to fly from. The flightless cormorant, a species endemic to the Galapagos Islands, meaning it exists nowhere else on Earth, still has wings, but they're stubby and useless, more like flippers. It hunts fish by swimming, much like a penguin. Galapagos has penguins too, the only penguins in the world that live near the equator, thriving in waters kept cold and rich by the humbled current that sweeps up from Antarctica. Marine iguanas, the only ocean-going lizards on Earth, learn to dive into the surf and graze on algae. They sneeze salt, they turn black in the cold water to absorb heat from the sun. On each island, they evolved slightly differently, as if the same basic template was being run through different experimental conditions. Giant tortoises tell the same story. Across the archipelago, different islands produced different subspecies. Tortoises on dry, flat islands evolved saddle-shaped shells, a raised front lip that lets them crane their necks higher to feed on tall cactus. The cactus, for its part, grew tall in the first place because tortoises kept eating it, an arms race between a hungry animal and a plant trying to keep its pads out of reach. On islands with lush ground vegetation, tortoises had no shortage of food at ground level. The cactus stayed low and the shells stayed domed. The shape of a tortoise shell is, in a sense, a portrait of the island where it evolved. The Spanish sailors who first stumbled onto the Galapagos Islands in 1535 were not looking for tortoises. They noted the giant tortoises lumbering slowly across the rock, found almost no fresh water, and left soon after arriving. The islands got their name from those tortoises. In Spanish, Galapago means something like saddle, a reference to the tortoise's shell shape, the islands of the tortoises. After the discovery, Galapago slowly became known in Europe. Spanish explorers continued to visit but found little of economic value. The islands were volcanic, nearly waterless, and not suitable for farming. For a century, they were mostly ignored. Then the pirates came. During the golden age of piracy in the 17th century, English buccaneers discovered what the Galapagos offered people who were being hunted by the Spanish Navy. Remoteness. The islands were 600 miles from the nearest coast. There were deep, sheltered bays where a ship could anchor out of sight, fresh water in the highlands if you knew where to look, and no authority. The buccaneers would beach their ships in the sandy coves, scrape the holes clean, repair their rigging in the shade of the Palo Santo trees, and wait for the coast to clear. Giant tortoises on the islands were, from the pirates' perspective, a perfect food source. They could be stacked alive in a ship's hold four or five tall. They required no food and no water aboard the boats. They stayed alive for a year or more in those conditions. When food ran low, pirates killed one for its meat. It was, by the accounts of the sailors who ate them, remarkably tasty. Pirates were followed by whalers. By the late 18th century, British and American whaling fleets had depleted whale populations in the Atlantic so severely that they began hunting in the Pacific. Galapagos set in the middle of one of the richest sperm whale feeding grounds in the world. The cold, nutrient-rich currents were extraordinarily productive, a deep ocean cafeteria that drew whales from across the Pacific. By 1800, dozens of whaling ships arrived at the islands every year. Their logs survive and they tell a consistent story. The tortoises were taken in enormous numbers. One estimate, based on those logs, suggests that more than 100,000 tortoises were removed from the islands between 1814 and 1844 alone. More than 3,000 a day. One ship's voyage in particular became a part of history. In October 1820, a Nantucket whaler called the Essex anchored at Floriana Island and spent several days collecting tortoises, ultimately taking around 60 animals. Before leaving, a crew member set fire to the island as a prank. The blaze burned for months. When cabin boy Thomas Nickerson revisited Floriana years later, it was still a blackened wasteland. The fire is now considered one of the factors that drove the Floriana tortoise to extinction. It was not the last calamity to befall the Essex that year. Sailing west with their cargo into open ocean, a sperm whale rammed the ship and continued ramming it until it sank. The crew escaped in longboats. When rescuers finally found them months later, only eight of the 20 men were alive. The story became the basis for one of the most famous pieces of American literature, Herman Melville's Moby Dick. And the 60 tortoises the crew had collected from Floriana? Some of them, it turns out, likely floated ashore somewhere along the coast of Isabella Island. The significance of that would not be understood for nearly 200 years. More to come on that later. By the time Charles Darwin arrived in 1834, several tortoise subspecies were already extinct or nearly extinct. He came aboard the HMS Beagle as a 26-year-old naturalist, invited less for his scientific mind and more to provide educated conversation for the captain on a long and lonely voyage. He spent five weeks in Galapagos, visiting four islands. He scrambled up the black lava fields on Santiago Island, waded through shallow lagoons thick with pink flamingos on Floriana, and sat eating lunch on the back of a giant tortoise on Santa Cruz, noting in his journal that it walked at a rate of about four miles a day. He collected finches, iguanas, tortoises, and plants. He was curious, but his theory of evolution by natural selection would take him another 20 years to develop fully, and he would later admit that he didn't fully understand what he was seeing when he first visited. But in those five weeks, Darwin observed something that would become the foundation of modern biology: that species on different islands, clearly related to each other, had diverged in specific ways that matched the specific conditions of each island. The finches had different beak shapes, the tortoises had different shell shapes. It was, once he understood it, overwhelming evidence that species were not fixed by creation. They changed, they adapted, they evolved. The Galapagos became the most famous living laboratory on Earth, yet the destruction of what they contained continued. Ecuador claimed the islands in 1832 and established a penal colony on Floriana Island, the first permanent human settlement in the archipelago. When the colony failed in the 1850s, its governor, General Jose de Villamil, ordered the resident farm animals, goats, donkeys, and cattle, released onto other islands for future colonists to use. More colonists arrived over the following decades, and more animals came with them. By the early 20th century, goats, pigs, dogs, and cats had been introduced to islands across the archipelago. The U.S. military established an air base on Baltra Island during World War II, bringing rats. To the isolated ecosystems of Galapagos, each new introduction was a catastrophe. The native animals there had no instinct to flee a mammal predator. They'd never had one. Birds and marine iguanas sat calmly while cats stalked them. Portoise eggs, laid in the warm volcanic sand, were dug up and eaten by rats and pigs. The same remoteness that made the Galapagos a wonder for naturalists had left its species with no instinct to avoid predation. In the right context, goats are perfectly suited to thrive under harsh conditions. They are hardy, adaptable, efficient, and can eat almost anything. They can survive on minimal water and thrive in terrain that other livestock can't. For sailors who needed animals that could be dropped on a remote island and left to fend for themselves until they returned, these qualities made them an ideal living pantry, always there, always surviving, and always edible. Those same qualities also make them cataclysmic on islands. An island ecosystem is, by definition, a closed system with finite resources. What exists has evolved over millions of years in a delicate balance, each species adapted to what was available, each occupying a role that no other species competed for. That balance is extraordinarily fragile and susceptible to disruption from large grazing mammals. The plants had no defenses against grazing, no thorns to deter a goat, root systems deep enough to survive repeated cropping, or chemical deterrence developed through evolution. The Opuntia cactus, one of the tallest and most distinctive plants in the archipelago, was a critical food source for native wildlife. Because of this, it had spent millions of years evolving its spines against the craning necks of tortoises. It had no answer for goats that simply bit through the pad and kept chewing. A goat in the Galapagos could eat anything it wanted, as much as it wanted, and nothing would stop it. For a goat, it was paradise. For everything else, it was the end of a world that had taken millions of years to build. Goats' reproduction dynamics made things exponentially worse. A single female goat can produce two or three offspring per year, meaning that under good conditions, abundant food, no predators, and no disease, a population of goats doubles roughly every two years. A few dozen goats released on an island would become tens of thousands within a decade. That's exactly what happened across the archipelago. On island after island where goats had been introduced, the pattern was the same. Goats eat everything leaves, bark, roots, seedlings, cacti. Goats stripped the Apuntia cactus to stumps. Palo Santo trees cast the highland forest in a ghostly silver during dry season. Branches bare and skeletal for most of the year, brilliant green for just a few weeks after rain. Goats ate them down to nothing. Native grasses that held the thin volcanic soil in place disappeared. Without root systems, the soil eroded from the hillsides and slid into the sea. What had been forested slopes became bare lava. The tortoises that depended on that vegetation for food and shade were left on a baking volcanic moonscape. In 1995, the Charles Darwin Foundation organized what they called a Tortoise Summit, a gathering of scientists and conservationists who came to look at the evidence and figure out what, if anything, could be done. They reviewed population counts, aerial photographs, and vegetation surveys. What they were looking at was a landscape in the process of being erased. The conclusion was stark. If immediate action wasn't taken, the giant tortoises of Galapagos would be extinct within a generation. Something had to be done. But what? Complete eradication was the only answer. The alternative, trapping some and culling some, essentially reducing the population without completely eliminating it, was cheaper and less controversial. But, every expert agreed, it would be ultimately useless. As long as any breeding goats remained on the island, the population would rebound. Goats reproduce faster than any eradication program could remove them, so partial control wasn't a solution. It was just a slower way of losing. In 1997, Galapagos National Park and the Charles Darwin Foundation convened an international workshop of experts in island restoration and invasive species management. They gathered in Puerto Iota on Santa Cruz Island, the largest town in the archipelago. The town sits on the edge of the arid zone, where the paved road ends at the research station and the lava field begins. Around a conference table, they spread out aerial photographs, vegetation surveys, and population counts. They concluded that total eradication of the goats on northern Isabella, Santiago, and Pinta Island was feasible. Goats had already been removed from five smaller islands in the archipelago, but these three were the largest uninhabited islands where the problem remained. Southern Isabella was excluded. A human community lived there, making complete eradication impractical. The project took its name from Isabella because that island was the centerpiece. It alone comprises roughly half the total land mass of the entire archipelago, and its tortoise population faced the most urgent collapse. The plan was to work in sequence, Pinta first as a training ground, then Santiago, and finally Isabella. The scale of the work would be unprecedented, but experts concluded it was possible. They called it Project Isabella, and it would become one of the most ambitious invasive species eradication programs ever attempted. The Global Environment Facility, a fund that finances environmental projects in developing countries, approved funding for Project Isabella in 1998. The first phase, to train project staff, began immediately. They were trained in GPS operation, riflery, hunting techniques, and dog handling. They brought something no outsider could, a lifetime of reading the weather that rolled in off the Pacific and moving through treacherous terrain. By the time the hunting teams were operational, they were considered the most effective invasive species eradication team in the world. Project Isabella began on the smallest of the three islands. Pinta, the original home of Lonesome George himself. By the late 1990s, researchers had confirmed that no Pinta tortoises remained in the wild, leaving only George, living in his enclosure on Santa Cruz Island, as the last of his kind. Habitat restoration was discussed, but Pinta needed to be goat-free before any progress could be made. Work on Pinta began in 1999. Teams of hunters combed the island on foot, moving through the recovering scrub in pursuit of any goats they could find. The foliage had been almost entirely erased by the goats, but it was already showing the first signs of returning life: pale green shoots pushing up through the cracks in the lava. In an area of roughly 15,000 acres, the goat population had been dramatically reduced by earlier eradication attempts, and only a few hundred animals remained. The island was declared goat-free later that year. Santiago Island was the next target and the real training ground for Isabella. Santiago is approximately 145,000 acres, 10 times the size of Pinta. Its landscape is a patchwork of ancient and recent lava flows, the older rock weathered to a deep reddish brown, the terrain rising through successive vegetation zones to a cloud wrapped interior. When the eradication team arrived, it held approximately 79,000 feral goats and 18,000 feral pigs. Both had to go. The strategy for Santiago was split into two sequential parts, aerial and ground. Helicopters, flying low and fast across the island, divided it into a grid. The noise of the rotors echoed across the lava fields and ravines, scattering birds from the scrub. Sharpshooters, perched in the helicopter doors, fired at the goats below, checking off each sector one by one. This way, hunters could cover in days what would have taken weeks on foot. Helicopters had already become indispensable in the Galapagos. Much of the archipelago's interior is simply too remote and too steep to reach any other way. Conservation teams had been using helicopters to airlift giant tortoises for years. In areas too remote for any vehicle, they'd hover overhead and lower large nets to collect animals. Juveniles raised at the breeding center on Santa Cruz Island were ferried back to their home islands the same way, dropped into the wild once they were large enough to survive on their own. In the first sweep of Santiago, the teams killed tens of thousands of goats. 90% of the island's population was gone within the first two years. That left roughly 8,000 goats, those that were the hardest to find and the hardest to kill. Goats learn in the most basic animal sense. Behavior that leads to a bad outcome gets avoided. Goats that had survived two years of airborne sharpshooters had learned one thing above all else. When you hear a helicopter, hide. They moved into dense vegetation where aerial visibility was poor. Some even sheltered in lava tubes. The long, hollow tubes left behind when the outer shell of a lava flow cools and hardens while the molten rock inside drains away. That process leaves dark, winding caves that run for hundreds of meters beneath the surface. The goats' ability to adapt made aerial hunting alone insufficient. The team would sweep an area, find nothing, and have 20 goats emerge from cover the moment the helicopter left. The surviving population would breed, within months, the cold areas would begin to repopulate. Fortunately, conservationists had a secret weapon. Judas goats. The Judas Goat technique, named for the biblical figure who betrayed Jesus to Roman authorities, relies on a simple fact. Goats are intensely social animals. A lone goat will seek out other goats, finding them by sight, smell, or sound. The eradication team captured female goats from the wild. Each one was sterilized so she could never produce offspring, then injected with hormones to keep her in a constant state of heat, signaling to male goats that she was ready to mate. The goat was fitted with a radio collar that broadcast her GPS location and released back into the wild. She would pick her way across the lava fields and through the scrub, following her nose towards the nearest cluster of other goats, entirely unaware of the signal she was broadcasting. The hunter's job was to track the Judas Goat's signal, find her, and kill every animal in her vicinity. The Judas Goat herself was always spared. She would move on, find another group, and lead the hunters there, over and over again. On Santiago Island, more than 200 Judas goats were deployed. On Isabella, the number would reach 770. The technique wasn't new. It had been used in a smaller goat eradication program in New Zealand, but Project Isabella used it at a scale that had never been attempted. The team treated the operation as a science experiment as much as a hunt, continually refining their approach. How many Judas goats to deploy per square kilometer, when to run sweeps, how tightly to space the tracking network to ensure no surviving goats could hide. They published everything protocols, failures, and adjustments, so that future eradication projects worldwide could learn from them. In 2006, the last goat on Santiago was killed. Tens of thousands of carcasses were left on the hillsides to decompose, returning to the soil the nutrients they had spent years taking from it. Finally, Santiago Island was clean. The work on Santiago had taken five years at a cost of roughly $6 million, much lower than original projections. Now came the most difficult phase, Isabella Island. Northern Isabella Island covers approximately 250,000 acres, roughly 400 square miles, and features five active volcanoes. It's the largest island in the Galapagos, and parts of it are among the most remote and inhospitable terrain on Earth. The coastline is raw black lava broken by the sea into jagged shelves and tide pools. Inland, the land rises through dry scrub, then cloud forest, then the bare volcanic flanks of the calderas themselves, some still steaming, their rims disappearing into the mist. There are areas so remote that no human being has ever set foot there. In 2004, when aerial hunting on Isabella began, there were between 100,000 and 150,000 goats spread across the landscape, grazing in the open lowlands and sheltering in the deep ravines. In the first seven months, 55,000 goats were killed. The helicopter teams worked in systematic sweeps, covering sector after sector, with the shooting teams rotating through shifts to maintain the breakneck pace. Then the goats started hiding. The pattern repeated what had happened on Santiago, but at a much greater scale. The first sweep cleared the open ground, the accessible slopes, and the areas where goats had been grazing in the open. What remained were wily survivors hiding in dense vegetation, steep terrain, labyrinthine ravines, lava tube networks, or the cloud forest where visibility dropped to a few meters. 770 Judas goats were released on Isabella so the teams could track individual collar signals, chasing down goats one at a time across hundreds of thousands of acres. Teams tracked signals from the ground as well as from the air. Dogs, trained to ignore native wildlife while tracking goats, were deployed in areas too difficult for aerial work. The final 10% of the goat population took as long to eradicate as the first 90%. In 2006, the last feral goat was removed from northern Isabella. The final metrics, across all three islands, more than 150,000 goats killed. Total cost? Approximately $10.5 million. Total area cleared? More than 1.2 million acres. It was and still is the largest island restoration project in the history of conservation. The goat carcasses were left where they fell. A goat that grades on an island's vegetation has consumed an enormous quantity of organic material, nutrients that belong in the soil, not in the animal. If the carcasses were removed, which would have been logistically impossible at this scale, those nutrients would leave the island permanently. For a while, the islands were quiet in a way they hadn't been in decades. No goats moving through the scrub, no hooves on the lava. It was the silence of an ecosystem catching its breath. Within months, the volcanic rock that had been scraped bare began to change. Scientists had expected slow regeneration, but the speed of it exceeded predictions. Within a year of the goats being culled from Santiago, plants were already re-emerging from root systems that had been suppressed but surviving underground for decades. Native grasses came back first, stabilizing the thin soil, spreading its pale green mats across the lava. Next came shrubs, then tree seedlings. The Opuntia cactus, which had been eaten down to stumps across much of the archipelago, began growing. The Pala Santo trees came back. Aerial photographs taken before and after the eradication on Isabella and Santiago showed a dramatic transformation. Brown, eroded hillsides blooming into dense green, the contours of the land softening as vegetation filled in the spaces between the rock. The rejuvenation of wildlife was equally dramatic. The Galapagos rail is a small, flightless bird that lives in the dense ground vegetation of the highlands, a secretive creature. Heard more often than seen, its call a sharp, repetitive ticking from deep in the undergrowth. It was one of the species most severely impacted by goat grazing, not because goats ate the birds directly, but because they ate the vegetation that the birds needed to live in. When vegetation disappeared, the rail's habitat disappeared with it. After the goat eradication on Santiago, researchers went back to count rails. The results were heartening. In less than a decade, the rail population had rebounded 16fold. The giant tortoise recovery was much slower. Tortoises can live for more than a century, and they reproduce slowly. But the trend was unmistakable. Thanks to invasive species removal and captive breeding programs, the tortoise population, which had crashed from an estimated 250,000 animals in the 16th century to roughly 3,000 by the 1970s, began to recover. While the eradication succeeded, one thread in the story had no happy ending. After Pinta Island was declared goat-free in 1999, the question of what to do with the island's only surviving tortoise became more pressing. Researchers had spent decades trying to find lonesome George a suitable mate. There were no living Pinta Island tortoises other than George, so female tortoises from other islands were tried, some with similar shell morphology, some from genetically related subspecies. But George was consistently uninterested. He spent his days the way he always had, moving slowly between the prickly pear and the palosanto trees, seeking shade in the midday heat, and making his way to the watering hole in the afternoon. The females shared his corral. He acknowledged them in the way that he acknowledged most things, without urgency. In 2008, researchers announced what appeared to be a breakthrough. Eggs had been laid in George's enclosure. They were carefully incubated. For weeks, scientists watched for any sign of development. There was none. The eggs were unfertilized. George died on June 24, 2012. He was found by his keeper, Fausto Jarena, who had cared for him for more than 40 years. The cause of death was heart failure. His subspecies was declared extinct. The story did not end there. In 2012, DNA analysis of museum specimens and captive animals identified a tortoise living on Wolf Volcano in northern Isabella that carried Pinta Island tortoise genes, evidence of interbreeding between subspecies at some point in the past. Further surveys found more such animals. In 2019, researchers collected 36 hybrid tortoises from Wolf Volcano with high concentrations of pinta ancestry. They were placed in a captive breeding program at what is now known at the appropriately named Fausto Yarena Breeding Center. They are not Pinta Island tortoises, but they do carry some of the genetic heritage of the subspecies George represented. Whether that partial lineage counts as a recovery or a different kind of loss depends on how scientists define what they're trying to save. The story has an echo that is still unfolding. In 2019, a joint expedition by the Galapagos National Park and Galapagos Conservancy discovered a single female tortoise on Fernandina Island, the most volcanically active island in the archipelago, and one where no living tortoise had been seen since 1906. Genetic analysis confirmed she belonged to a species Chelenoidus phasticus that had been considered extinct for more than a century. Unlike the Pinta tortoise, her species decline was geological, centuries of eruptions, not introduced goats. She was nicknamed Fernanda. Expeditions to find her a mate have so far come up empty. The race to avoid another lonesome George is not over. Project Isabella didn't end the problem of invasive species in the Galapagos. When the project concluded in 2006, goats remained on three inhabited islands: Santa Cruz, San Cristobal, and Isabel's southern section, where human communities made complete eradication impossible. Within a decade, goats had been reintroduced on nine separate occasions to islands that had been cleared. Each reintroduction had to be dealt with. Each one cost money and time and represented the risk of another decades-long ecological crisis. The lesson was that clearing individual islands wasn't enough. The goal had to be an archipelago-wide reduction in goat population to the point where reintroduction became manageable. Not a one-time eradication, but a sustained, ongoing commitment. Beyond goats, other invasive species continue to threaten the archipelago. Feral cats move silently through the scrub at night, preying on sea turtle eggs and hatchling iguanas before they can reach the water. Black rats have devastated populations of seabirds on multiple islands, eating eggs and chicks in their nests. Three species of endemic Galapagos rats are already extinct, replaced by the invasive black rat. The hill raspberry, a plant introduced to the islands in the 20th century, has invaded the humid highlands of San Cristobal, Floriana, Santa Cruz, and Isabella, forming dense thorny thickets that crowd out endemic vegetation in the very zones where the native flora is most lush and irreplaceable. Each of these problems requires its own campaign. The Galapagos National Park, the Charles Darwin Foundation, and a network of international partners are working on all of them. Today, the Galapagos Islands receive roughly 300,000 tourists per year. They come to see the marine iguanas and the blue-footed boobies, to snorkel with sea lions and to dive with hammerhead sharks. But above all, they come for the giant tortoises. Tourism funds conservation. It provides the economic rationale that keeps the national park well funded and politically supported in Ecuador. But it also brings risks. More boats mean more opportunities for invaders to hitch rides. More visitors mean more pathways for new invasives to reach the islands that are clean. The tools and techniques developed during Project Isabella, GPS tracking, the Judas Animal Technique, and aerial hunting protocols, have now been used in invasive species eradications on more than 80 islands worldwide. The work is slow, expensive, and unglamorous, but it's effective. In the summer of 2000, a conservation biologist named Dr. James Gibbs climbed Wolf Volcano on the northern tip of Isabella Island to conduct a routine survey. He had been studying the Galapagos since the 1980s, spending months at a time as a field researcher, living on little more than a tent and a tarp and watching evolution happen in real time. Wolf Volcano is the most remote point in the archipelago. Its upper slopes are often hidden in clouds and its flanks sheeted with dark lava that catches and holds the equatorial heat. He thought he knew what to expect, but he found tortoises that shouldn't have been there. The resident tortoise subspecies on Wolf Volcano has a domed shell, the kind associated with islands that have lush ground vegetation, where reaching high is not a survival strategy. But some of the tortoises Gibbs found had saddlebacked shells. The raised front lip, the craning neck, the unmistakable shape of a tortoise from a dry island that needed to reach tall cactus. It was, he later recalled, completely inconsistent with everything he expected to find. That shell shape belongs to Floriana Island, 200 miles to the south. The Floriana tortoise had been extinct on its home island since roughly 1850. So why were there Floriana tortoises living on Wolf Volcano? The answer came from ships, war, and open water. Whalers and other vessels regularly offloaded tortoises near Wolf Volcano, sometimes tossing surplus animals overboard to lighten cargo before setting sail into the open Pacific. Tortoises float. Some of those animals, geneticists came to believe, had drifted ashore on Wolf Volcano's western flank, found land, survived, and interbred with the local population over the following decades and centuries. You may recall the Essex from earlier in this episode, the Nantucket whaler that collected Floriana tortoises in 1820 before being sunk by a sperm whale was one of the many ships that contributed to this accidental seeding. Their descendants were the saddle-backed animals standing in front of Gibbs two centuries later, looking back at him with the steady, unhurried gaze of an animal that had no idea how improbable its existence was. Gibbs mounted three more expeditions to Wolf Volcano. His team collected blood samples that were eventually sequenced. The genetics confirmed it. These were Floriana hybrids, not pure Floriana tortoises. Their ancestry had blended with the Wolf Volcano population over 200 years, but carrying concentrations of Floriana DNA that no living tortoise was supposed to have. The hybrids with the highest concentrations of Floriana ancestry were brought to the Fausto Girena Breeding Center on Santa Cruz Island. They were paired deliberately, their offspring tracked, their genetics mapped. The goal was to produce animals whose Floriana ancestry was as concentrated as possible. Not the subspecies itself, but maybe something close enough to fill the ecological role it had left behind on its native island. Meanwhile, conservation teams began the work that had to precede any tortoise release, clearing Floriana of the invasive species that would prevent them from surviving. Feral cats, black rats, and, of course, goats. In 2007, the last feral goat was removed from Floriana. The rats and cats took longer. When they were finally gone, Floriana's endemic birds began returning almost immediately. The Galapagos rail, absent from the island for nearly 200 years, came back. So did populations of seabirds that had not nested in Floriana within living memory. On February 20th, 2026, Galapagos National Park Rangers strapped plastic crates to their backs and hiked uphill through knife-edged lava rock. The lava field gave way to scrub, and the scrub gave way to the island's interior, a landscape of pale palosanto trees and recovering undergrowth, quiet except for the wind and the distant call of birds. When they reached the ridgeline and opened the crates, 158 tortoises took their first steps on Floriana Island for the first time in 175 years. Each one was fitted with a GPS sensor. Each one was the product of a 15-year breeding program, an accidental discovery on a remote volcano, and a two-century chain of shipwrecks, floating tortoises, and scientific detective work. They are not pure Floriana tortoises. They carry a blend of ancestry shaped by 200 years of isolation and interbreeding on a different island entirely. Whether that makes them a restoration of what was lost or something genuinely new is a question scientists are still working out. The honest answer is probably both. But they are walking on Floriana. Lonesome George is still on display at the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island, preserved by taxidermists at the American Museum of Natural History, returned to the Galopgos after his death, and placed in a climate-controlled case where visitors can stand in front of him to try to understand what it means to be the last of something. His species could not be saved. But the chain of events that led to his extinction also left traces, genetic breadcrumbs that nobody expected to find, and those traces have led to something that looks, at least from a distance, like a second chance. If you ever visit the Galapagos, go see Lonesome George. Then take the ferry to Floriana and look for the tortoises. Project Isabella was completed in 2006. It remains the largest island restoration project ever undertaken. The techniques it developed have been used in invasive species eradications around the world, saving countless species from extinction. The Galapagos Islands were designated as Ecuador's first national park in 1959, the same year feral goats were introduced to Pinta Island. They were named a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site in 1978. They're protected under Ecuadorian law, managed by the Galapagos National Park Directorate, and monitored continuously by the Charles Darwin Foundation and international partners. The work is slow, expensive, and never finished. If you want to support this work, the Charles Darwin Foundation and Galapagos Conservancy both accept donations and provide detailed information about current threats and ongoing projects at DarwinFoundation.org and Galapagos.org. EcoSide is an independent narrative podcast. Each episode tells the story of environmental harm, who caused it, and who paid the price. These are the stories about what humans do to the natural world and what it takes to reckon with it. Thanks for listening.