February 24, 2006
Galapagos Islands and Charles Darwin Research Center
This web site now has something that you can not get by reading Darwin’s The Origin of the Species - > pictures and even a movie or two. I just got back from a two week trip to the Galapagos Islands and have several hundred pictures of the wildlife from santa cruz island (including the Darwin research center) , floreana, gorden rocks, daphne, cousins and seymore. Most of these are of underwater marine life including several of a 40 foot whale shark. The marine life around the galapagos is much more impressive that anywhere else I have dived. On every dive I encoutered sea lions, sharks, and eagle/golden rays. And on most dives I saw at least one manta ray. Unlike the carribbean, the water teams with thousands of fish. I am not going to post all of the pictures, but some of the best can be found by following the links below.
Darwin’s origin of the species discusses the diversity of the finches on the galapagos in great detail. While these birds are everywhere around santa cruz, they are small, timid and while diverse not very impressive. I found the marine life much more interesting.
Darwin’s finches on path to tortuga bay, Galapagos
Darwin’s finch in trees at Darwin’s Station
While Darwin’s finches are most unimpressive, the same is not true of the blue footed booby. This is a cool looking bird. I never saw one underwater, but they dive into the water to catch fish.
the galapagos blue footed booby
The following movies require a movie player like quicktime or windows media player to be installed and working. I have not been able to get windows media player to work with these but that is just typical microsoft. Firefox + quicktime works. The made the first two movies small by editing out frames so everyone can watch. The others require high speed internet.
The next 2 movies are very large so right click on the link and save these files to your desktop (save link as). Then left click on the file icon on your desktop to play with you favorite move player - quicktime, media player or real player will work. It is possible to left click on these links on my web site and see the movie after a download delay (2 minutes with high speed internet, hours with dial up) - the transfer rate is too slow to get a good movie with this method.
This sea lion was trying to show us divers how to swim. I did not edit out frames as I did in the other movies so this will not play correctly even with high speed internet. I reccommend downloading it or playing it twice, as at least on my computer if I play it once, it plays normal the second time through.
If this does not work, I have made a few pdf files of the sea lion in the video:
galapagos sea lion
sea lion shot 2
sea lion shot 3
high speed required for the following movie (caution 10meg file download before playing)
millions of fish in the galapagos
It just is not like this anywhere else in the ocean. Charles Darwin missed a lot by not going for a swim.
