Photo: RODRIGO BUENDIA/AFP/Getty
A member of a tortoise species not seen in over 100 years and long thought to be extinct was just found on the Galapagos island of Fernandina.
According toUSA Today, the GTRI is a collaboration between the Galapagos National Park Directorate and the U.S. non-profit Galapagos Conservancy.
The Galapagos Conservancy tweeted out the good news on Wednesday. “BREAKING NEWS! GC’s own @wacho_tapia just returned from Fernandina Island in #Galapagos, where they discovered a female #tortoise,” the tweet read. “Tortoises on Fernandina have been thought to be extinct for over 100 years, so this is a monumental finding!”
TheInternational Union for Conservation of Naturecurrently lists the Fernandina Giant Tortoise as critically endangered and possibly extinct. The last sighting of the species was in 1906.
The Ministry of the Environment said that the tortoise, who is little underweight, but healthy overall, was taken to a breeding center for giant tortoises on Santa Cruz Island, and added that it could be possible that more members of the species are also alive.
“This encourages us to strengthen our search plans to find other turtles, which will allow us to start a breeding program in captivity to recover this species,” said Danny Rueda, director of the Galapagos National Park, according to USA Today.
The Fernandina Giant Tortoise is one out of an estimated 14 giant tortoise species native to the Galapagos Islands. TheGalapagos Conservancy websitesays that when the Galapagos was established as a National Park in 1959, only “11 out of the 14 originally named populations remained and most of these were endangered if not already on the brink of extinction.” Many of the tortoises had been killed for oil or food.
Mark Romanov and John Harrington
“While giant tortoises once thrived on most of the continents of the world,” the website says, “the Galapagos tortoises now represent one of the remaining two groups of giant tortoises in the entire world — the other group living on Aldabra Atoll in the Indian Ocean.”
The Galapagos Islands, aUNESCO World Heritage Site, are an archipelago made up of 19 islands and located about 600 miles off of the coast of Ecuador.
In celebration of Galante’s discovery, the Turtle Conservancy and Global Wildlife Conservation are pledging a $100,000 match to further conservation efforts of the Fernandina Giant Tortoise. To have your donation matched, go towww.globalwildlife.org.
The expedition that led to this amazing animal find will be featured in a summer 2019 episode of Animal Planet’sExtinct or Alive.
source: people.com
