CDRS DIRECTOR 1984-88
By: H. E. Corley Smith
When Günther Reck arrived with his wife and children to take up his post as Director, he had long been familiar with the Darwin Station and the problems of Galapagos conservation. He had begun as a tourist guide and then served for years with the National Institute of Fisheries, in which capacity he had collaborated with the CDRS and the University of Guayaquil in schemes to study and protect the resources of the Galapagos waters. It was therefore most appropriate that he should be in charge of the Darwin Station during the discussions leading up to the creation of a marine reserve.
This long-sought development was finally decreed by President Léon Febres-Corderoin 1986, 20 years after the recommendations in the Grimwood-Snow report and long after the more detailed proposals of Wellington, Robinson and the authors of the Master Plan; but when the decree was promulgated it went far beyond their most optimistic demands. The "Galapagos Marine Resources Reserve" is to include the entire interior waters of the archipelago surrounded by a further zone 15 nautical miles wide, measured from the extreme limits of the islands,a total of 30,000 square miles (80,000 square kilometers). Progress had been slow because of the difficulty in reconciling the various local and national interests involved, which fell under the jurisdiction of different ministries responsible for the law of the sea, defense, fisheries, tourism and development.The reserve was to be administered by a Commission representing these interests,presided over by the Minister of Agriculture, who was already responsible for the Galapagos National Park. The Commission was authorized "to seek the assistance and collaboration of the Charles Darwin Research Station and such national and international organizations as it considers necessary". Much negotiation was still needed before detailed administrative plans could be finalized. Advice was sought from the Great Barrier Reef National Park in Australia and from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the U.S.A.
The importance of extending legal protection to the sea as well as to the land area can scarcely be exaggerated. The Galapagos are situated at the confluence of the great Eastern Pacific currents and their waters are of unique scientific interest. Quite apart from the direct dependence on the sea of much of the wildlife- including nesting seabirds, marine iguanas, sea lions and fur seals - the Galapagos marine resources may prove to be at least as significant scientifically as the better researched terrestrial resources. The waters are still in a nearly pristine state but the increasing danger of pollution from the discharge of waste by cruise ships and the growing human settlements is obvious, as is the frequency with which ships are wrecked on the archipelago's notoriously dangerous shores. These are threats for the future. Meanwhile recent research has discovered gratifying numbers of sperm whales in the Galapagos Grounds off the west coast of Isabela,where they were eliminated by whalers in the 19th century.
The El Niño period of extraordinarily heavy rainfall was followed by two years of drought. Fire broke out in the Darwin Station's administration building and, while it was possible to prevent it spreading to the other buildings, lack of water and appliances thwarted all efforts to save the office and most of its valuable contents. Thanks to the generosity of Swedish supporters, most of the damage was made good in a relatively short time.
A much bigger fire, started outside the National Park by farmers, swept across the desiccated vegetation of the Sierra Negra volcano on Isabela Island. It lasted from February to July 1985 and attracted world-wide publicity, including much imaginative misinformation. The local residents, armed forces from the mainland,fire-fighting bodies from Canada and the U.S.A. gallantly joined the National Park Service in the appalling heat. They checked the spread of the conflagration by encircling it with a firebreak 40 kilometers long, but it was months before the belated rains finally extinguished the last of the fires. The giant tortoises and other better known Galapagos species were never in real danger but some 175square kilometers of wilderness, still barely explored botanically, were devastated. Monitoring of the damage to the vegetation and the life that depends on it began immediately but it will be years before the effects can be measured and half a century before some species of trees can again grow to their full size.
Marcia Wilson in charge of herpetology at the Research Station, two decades of captive breeding of reptiles was showing encouraging results. Much had been achieved by trial and error in this pioneering endeavour, but now experiments were being conducted by the GNPS and the CDRS in a more rigorously scientific manner. The staff of the two organisations, advised by Howard and Heidi Snell, compared hatching results obtained at different temperatures and humidities, and also monitored the relative success rates in rearing small tortoises on a cement floor inside the centre with those obtained on a soil surface in the open air. It had recently been discovered that the sex of tortoises is determined by the temperature at which the eggs are incubated, so it became possible, by controlling the temperatures in the incubators, to produce a higher proportion of females to males and thus to speed up the eventual repopulation of the Galapagos by the giant tortoises(galápagos) that gave the islands their name. In 1988, the 1000th captive-bred tortoise was released on its ancestral island, and there were signs that the oldest of these would soon start reproducing in the wild. It was not to be expected that, in the harsh Galapagos conditions, hatching and rearing success in the wild would be as high as at the Station, but it was evident that the re-establishment of most of the once abundant races of giant tortoises was well under way.
Perhaps the most striking success was the preservation of the Española(Hood) Island race (Geochelone elephantopus hoodensis), of which only a few elderly survivors remained when the Darwin Station was inaugurated. By 1988, Española had a youthful population of over 200 tortoises, all of them captive-bred. Apart from the Arabian Oryx and Père David's Deer, this is the only known case of a wild population derived entirely from captive-bred animals.
Controlled experiments with hatching and rearing land iguanas likewise produced highly encouraging results; indeed over-crowding in the rearing pens became a serious problem. In the wild, only 10% of hatchlings survive their first year but, with the introduction of electric incubators and a new substrate, the rearing centre achieved a survival rate 4 - 6 times higher than in nature. Twelve years after the rescue operation began, the future of all three of the endangered populations of land iguanas (whether they are distinct sub-species or species is uncertain)seemed secure. There were still problems in protecting the young animals after they had been released in their traditional colonial areas and this was notably the case with the "Seymour-Baltra" population. As Baltra Island had become an active military and tourist air base and was not included in the National Park, the problems of re-introducing its native iguanas were particularly complex;but negotiations were proceeding in 1988.
The proliferation of introduced animals and plants continued to be the biggest threat to the Galapagos ecosystems. Nevertheless, on the five islands where the goats had been eliminated and on Pinta, where a series of campaigns had resulted in near complete eradication, the vegetation was regenerating. Considerable success had also been achieved in the up-hill struggle with the black rats in the limited area of the breeding colony of dark-rumped petrels on Floreana, and also more extensively on Pinzón, where they had killed the young tortoises for half a century. There were well-grounded hopes of over-coming many though not all of the feral animal threats that had appeared insoluble a dozen years earlier.Some 80-100,000 goats had been killed on various islands but control of the vast herds on rugged Santiago remained a daunting challenge, beyond the current resources of the GNPS and CDRS. But even on Santiago, aided by the two years of drought,the hunters of the National Park Service had reduced the numbers of wild pigs to 2-3,000.
Training courses for park wardens and tourist guides had been continued and expanded.In addition two important "international workshops" were held at the CDRS. In 1987, one of these succeeded in bringing together 70 botanists from11 countries who had worked in the islands during the previous 25 years. Another,in 1988, attracted 60 reptile specialists from different branches of herpetology. These conferences were of great value not only for the exchange of ideas and the orientation of research but also for planning the future management of resources.
There was also a "mobile workshop" of national park officers, who visited the dozen parks and equivalent areas that had begun to be developed in continental Ecuador in recent years. The workshop ended with a week studying the Galapagos National Park, the first to be established. The mainland parks will require staff and the education programmes at the CDRS should provide a much-needed source of future conservation officers, while the Galapagos experience offers guidance for other conservation programmes in Ecuador and elsewhere in Latin America.By 1988, over 400 Ecuadorian students had been trained at the Darwin Research Station.
In addition to the usual botanical programmes, under the direction of the staff botanist, Jonas E. Lawesson, there were new projects, social rather than scientific in intent, that could have important long-term effects. After the National Park was established, the settlers continued to use the native trees for building material and firewood. This was not of great consequence when they were few in number but, with the rapid expansion of population due to the tourist industry,a serious depletion of woodlands was occurring, particularly on Santa Cruz Island.To provide an alternative source of materials experiments were begun, in collaboration with local farmers, to establish plantations of rapid-growing trees of useful species, unlikely to spread and compete with the slower growing native trees. Another scheme, in cooperation with the authorities and residents of San Cristóbal Island, was to re-afforest an area outside the park boundaries, where tree felling had caused erosion and endangered the water supply of Puerto Baquerizo, the provincial capital. Apart from the direct benefits, these joint ventures with the local people should help to increase public awareness of the value of conservation.
The sudden expansion of tourism in the 1980´s was unforeseen and no adequate measures had been taken to control it. When the Grimwood-Snow report was presented in 1966, its recommendation that tourism should be developed side by side with conservation of nature was greeted with considerable skepticism in official quarters,as Ecuador had never had any considerable tourist trade and few Ecuadorians or foreigners visited the Galapagos. However, the publicity that was needed to raise support for the Darwin Foundation had the additional effect of attracting visitors to the islands. From the mid-1970´s onwards, tourism developed its own impetus. At first it did not create serious problems as it was well managed and all tourists were conducted by trained and licensed guides, most of them dedicated conservationists. But between 1984 and 1988, the annual number of visitors rose steeply from under 20,000 to more than 40,000. Until then, the scientific monitoring of "tourist impact" had shown that carefully controlled parties, sleeping aboard the ships, were not harming either the flora or the fauna. Organised tourism was restricted to a number of "intensive use zones" of prime interest to visitors and it was not to the advantage of either tourism or conservation that visitors should roam in the vast areas designated as "primitive zones". The difficulty with increasing numbers of tourists was that relatively few areas were suitable for visits by organized parties, so there was the danger of too many people being concentrated in too few sites, thus destroying the sense of wilderness which was so important an element in the islands' attraction.
The increase in visitors was accompanied by an equally sudden increase in the local population, chiefly due to an influx of unemployed workers, who arrived from the mainland in the hope of profiting from the boom in tourism. The new-comers lacked understanding of the peculiar Galapagos conditions and did not share the appreciation of the interdependence of conservation and tourism that many of the older inhabitants had acquired through years of living together with the CDRS and the GNPS. To meet these new pressures on the environment, it was highly desirable that there should be a commensurate strengthening of the Galapagos National Park Service to impose the necessary controls. This did not happen:in fact the opposite occurred and the service was depleted. The Park Service staff were government employees and were paid at mainland rates, which were low by the standards of the Galapagos. Consequently valuable members of the staff were recruited by the expanding tourist companies who could offer higher wages,while the GNPS was unable to fill vacancies. The control of tourism, which had hitherto been remarkably successful, inevitably suffered. As it was the GNPS which represented the authority of the sovereign state in the National Park,the case for its reinforcement and reorganization was clear.
As in previous periods, most of the research work of the CDRS' own scientific staff was directly related to conservation policy, while "pure" research was the domain of the numerous "visiting scientists" using the Station's facilities. Their results, running into hundreds of learned papers, were usually printed separately in their specialist journals. Peter Grant summarized and drew conclusions from some 60 such papers written by members of his group during a dozen years of investigations and published a major work: "Ecology and Evolution of Darwin's Finches". The early part of 1984 saw the publication of no less than three distinguished collections of articles on Galapagos science and conservation by old hands at the Darwin Station: there was a volume by Pergamon Press (Oxford) in its "Key Environment" series; another by the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and a third by the Linnean Society of London. These were only a small part of the spate of Galapagos books and articles of all kinds, which poured out in these years. During the quarter of a century since the inauguration of the Charles Darwin Research Station,the remote Galapagos had become known to the world and there was even a growing understanding of the Darwin Foundation's successes and the still enormous problems with which it was confronted.
Shortly before Günther Reck left the Research Station, the Government of Ecuador and the Charles Darwin Foundation automatically renewed their original 25-year agreement for a further 5 years.