If more tortoises are found, she said, conservationists could start a captive breeding program.ĭeciphering the evolutionary relationship between the two Fernandina tortoises might be trickier. The presence of additional tortoise scats and tracks suggests they may find more animals on the island, Caccone said. The Galapagos National Park and the Galapagos Conservancy plan to scour the island of Fernandina for relatives of Fernanda in hopes of preserving the species. Areas of vegetation, scientists have theorized, were reduced by lava flows. The tortoises of Fernandina Island were believed to have been driven to extinction by volcanic eruptions on the island, including approximately 25 in the last two centuries. “Are there more tortoises on Fernandina that can be brought back into captivity to start a breeding program? How did tortoises colonize Fernandina and what is their evolutionary relationship to the other giant Galapagos tortoises?” “The finding of one alive specimen gives hope and also opens up new questions as many mysteries still remain,” said Caccone, a member of Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. ![]() The new finding clearly shows that the two tortoises found on Fernandina Island belong to their own lineage and are closer in relation to each other than to any other species of Galapagos tortoises, the numbers of which have been reduced by 85% to 90% since the early 19 th century, largely due to the arrival of whalers and pirates who killed them for food. It is believed that there are 15 distinct species of giant tortoise on the Galapagos Islands, according to Galapagos Conservancy, a U.S.-based nonprofit. “This also shows the importance of using museum collections to understand the past.” “Vast amounts of the genomes are similar between the two animals, but the process that explains how this happened we just don’t know,” said Adalgisa Caccone, a senior research scientist and lecturer in Yale’s Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and senior author of the study. ![]() Only one other tortoise, a large male discovered in 1906, has ever been found on Fernandina Island, an isolated island on the western edge of the iconic archipelago.Ī comparison of the genomes of Fernanda (as researchers call the recently discovered 50-year-old tortoise) and the 20 th century male specimen now housed at the California Academy of Sciences, revealed that the two animals are closely related, doubling the number of known members of Chelonoidis phantasticus, Yale University researchers report on June 9 in the journal Communications Biology.īut the discovery has raised many more questions. The discovery in 2019 of a lone small female tortoise living on one of the most inaccessible islands of the Galapagos Islands has baffled evolutionary biologists.
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