Fishy pigs lay waste to petrels on Darwin’s isle of Santiago

Press, 12 June 1987, Page 17

Fishy pigs lay waste to petrels on Darwin’s isle of Santiago

From

ROBIN McKIE,

of the London

“Observer,” in the Galapagos

During a research expedition last month to the Galapagos, a team led by a British ecologist, Sylvia Harcourt, settled down to a dinner of roast pork from a pig just shot To their disgust, the pork tasted entirely of greasy, oily fish. The reason for this bizarre culinary upset quickly became clear. They found that the pig had gorged, itself on a diet almost completely made up of one of the world’s rarest seabirds, the dark-rumped petrel. These petrels have a rare refuge on the island of Santiago but are now being wiped out by escaped farm pigs that can scent their burrows and kill the birds — which are clumsy on land — as they leave or enter. As a result, only about 150 pairs of petrels are thought to survive today. .. * “We had heard occasional stories of these petrel-tasting pigs from remote highland areas,” says Ms Harcourt, assistant director , of the Charles Darwin Research Station on the Galapagos. “However, this was our first experience of such an animal. I dread to think how many petrels that pig had killed.” Her story illustrates the desperate problem that now faces Santiago and several other Gala-

pagos islands. According to Darwin Station researchers, indeed, all indigenous plants and most of Santiago’s unique animals will be wiped out in five years by feral pigs and goats — unless an international emergency "clean-up" project is launched. Without such a project, they say, the death toll will be calamitous and will include the island’s species of giant tortoise, its petrels, and the Galapagos rail, a tiny insect-eating land bird. Also threatened are scalesia plants — strange, giant shrublike relations of the sunflower which recently grew as an entire forest across Santiago. Today, goats have eaten all but a few clifftop clumps of scalesia. Some animal victims have been claimed already, for Santiago’s population of the giant land iguana has now been wiped out — only 150 years after Charles Darwin reported that on this island he could not find “a spot free from the iguana’s burrows on which to pitch our single :> nt ”

That such a massive extinction should occur so quickly underlines the fragility of the ecology of Santiago and of the Galapagos in general. ■ Since Darwin’s day, the Galapagos have been ill-served by mankind. Late nineteenth-cen-tury whalers killed more than 100,000 giant tortoises for their oil; settlers introduced cats, dogs, goats, pigs and even ants, which have decimated the islands’ own remarkable animals and plants; and now unchecked tourism, which allowed more than 30,000 visitors to take trips around the undeveloped archipelago last year, is producing problems of soil erosion and pollution. For their part, the Darwin Station scientists, working on a shoe-string annual budget of £300,000, have battled valiantly and have had some Important successes. • In particular, they have begun breeding projects with several endangered species of the land iguana and also of the giant tortoise, restoring its population to abffit 15,000. ' ■

“We did have a real chance to save Santiago two years ago when a serious drought forced the pigs to cpme to the few remaining waterholes in . the island," Ms Harcourt says. “However we could not get together the resources and manpower in time and we lost the chance.” But the feral pigs and goats of Santiago threaten to overwhelm them, for the animals — particularly the pigs — have proved to be deviously effective in avoiding hunters. It has been proposed that soldiers from Ecuador should be sent in to deal with the problem, but the prospect of trigger-happy squaddies blasting tortoises and iguanas for dinner, as well as the goats and pigs, unnerves scientists even more than the prospect *of the continuing feral invasion. In the end, only an international project set up by agencies such as the World Wildlife Fund will satisfy the scientists. These organisations alone, they believe, can supply the proper resources and expertise. Z, : “We cannot expect the Ecuadorians to do everything to save the Galapagos," Ms Harcourt says. “The islands are a world heritage site — and that means the world must take a proper responajhility for it” ■ •'' '■ ' ■ * ■■ ' : _ _ ___