galapagos, day 5
by sam on 08/27/2013On Wednesday, the ship remained near Santa Cruz, but on the other side of the island, where we went to “Cerro Dragon” (or Dragon Hill), home to the native land iguanas, who were almost extinct before the Darwin foundation and the galapagos national park service helped restore the population through a captive breeding program (which is now over – there are only three land iguanas remaining at the Darwin research station). Our second stop of the morning was snorkeling at guy fawkes island (again, pictures to arrive later).
In the afternoon, we went to another portion of Santa Cruz known as “el eden”, and went for Zodiac rides along the water and looked for sharks.
In the evening, we took a sunset sail around Daphne Major, the site of evolutionary research on Darwin’s finches for the past 40+ years by Peter and Rosemary Grant of Princeton University. During their time studying the finches, they have actually witnessed first-hand two small-scale evolutionary changes to the finch population on this island.
