I’m drawn from my bed at dawn, lured by something deep and impossible to ignore – an evolutionary impulse, perhaps – to the top deck of the ship. I can’t sleep, and I don’t want to. Above my head a pair of frigatebirds are soaring against a sepia-tinged sky, angled wings perfectly still, their sleek tails split like tuning forks.
It’s a perfectly serene scene, but this is the Galapagos, so of course nothing is as it seems. Frigatebirds are in reality unconscionable pirates, liable at any moment to swoop on other species, harassing hapless blue-footed boobies mid-air, shaking them by the tail until they relent and regurgitate their meals.
These gangsters of the Galapagos lack waterproof feathers; they’d drown if they landed on the ocean so have worked out ways around that weakness. Their ingenuity, however, pales in comparison to the marine iguana, which Celebrity Cruises naturalist Elmer Salazar introduces to us as the “avengers of the archipelago”. Their superpower is being the only lizard in the world that dives for its food, feeding almost exclusively on seaweed. We’ll see countless examples of extraordinary evolutionary oddities like this during our seven-night island hop around the remote volcanic archipelago, 900km off the Ecuadorean coast.
The Galapagos will forever be associated with Charles Darwin’s 1835 visit, which seeded the embryo for his theory of natural selection. The naturalist’s grand realisation was that species adapted to their environment by evolving whatever characteristics were necessary for survival, and ditching anything surplus to requirements. Cormorants traded aerial abilities for aquatic prowess, their wings – redundant in the absence of land predators – shrivelling away to streamline their bodies for deep sea diving. The 17 species of Darwin finches around today all diverged from a common ancestor, developing different beaks depending on the availability of food sources. Giant tortoises evolved upwardly angled “saddleback” shells, allowing their heads to reach the tall pads of cactus trees.
Read the full story here
