The Galapagos Islands are amazing, of course.
The Islands were formed as volcanoes from the Nazca tectonic plate, with succeeding eruptions fashioning and changing them. An astonishing fact is that the eastern Galapagos Islands are millions of years older than the western ones, and some of the western islands are still being formed today.
Many of the islands have the distinctive conical shape of volcanoes, with some of the islands rising to 5000 feet above sea level. Most of the larger islands are formed from a single large volcano.
The stark beauty of the islands seems uniquely suited for displaying the special animals found in the Galapagos: the birds, the tortoises and iguanas, the SALLY LIGHTFOOT CRABS!!!
Well, this was my time to fall instantly and head-over-heels in love! Watching those brilliantly hued and industrious little crabs scuttle back and forth across the lichened rocks and in and out of the water was like watching jewels come to life.
And wow! Their uncanny accuracy when they flung their food into their mouths would make pro basketball players envy them! You just had to see it to believe it!
I took at least a million photos of the little darlings, and of course when we viewed the photos later, there was a good bit of bewilderment about why I took a million photos of the same little crab.
Well, duh! Was it not obvious that each of those little darlings was just a wee bit different from the others?!
I do admit that after I had been scrolling through my photos for a while I did wonder if I had taken the same little darling over and over and over….
Compared to Sally Lightfoot, those extremely famous Galapagos Finches were rather a let-down, dear reader. Sorry to burst your bubble. Wouldn’t you think that something that caused as much ruckus in the peaceful progression of humanity through the last several centuries as those finches did, would be at least a little memorable?
As I gazed at them that first day in the Galapagos, just sitting there in that bush and hopping around on the ground, I could not help thinking: THIS is the creature that eventually told us we came from Apes?
They were small and non-descript, mostly grayish and brownish, and to my admittedly untutored eye they looked like they belonged to the Sparrow family, except maybe a little fatter. OK, OK, don’t get your dander up, dear ornithologists among you – I am IGNORANT when it comes to birds, knowing only one thing about them: I do like them, yes I do.
But for those of you who simply must know, those little finches were probably not even in the finch family. They are thought now to have been a part of the mockingbird or blackbird families.
But you can keep calling them finches. If you start calling them Darwin’s Blackbirds or Darwin’s Mockingbirds, who will ever know what you are talking about? Sometimes science is just not helpful, a view the Creationists certainly must have had.
When you think about all the brouhaha those little birds have caused, all the out and out fighting and brawling between Creationists and Evolutionists, well, it doesn’t seem to compute that such a tiny little thing as those finches could cause such an uproar among humans.
You know, humans were going along just fine for centuries and centuries, secure in the knowledge that God had created each and every one of them, and then that thing called the Renaissance put a bee in their collective bonnet and they started questioning each and every little thing that the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire stood for, including the sort of important one about how humans came to be.
Scandalously, some men started proposing that there was something called biological evolution at work that occurred in accordance with natural laws.
Then along came Jean Baptiste Lamarck in the 1700s who put their ideas all together into a cohesive theory and topped it off by proposing that there is an alchemical force that drives organisms up a ladder of complexity through spontaneous generation.
At that point in the lecture, I started telling Myrtle that I will develop a plan for my own spontaneous combustion and that if she would like to join me on my journey up the ladder, she is welcome.
For once I think I flummoxed her, but then her nimble little mind identified the problem. “Well, if you spontaneously combust, that is sort of the end of you, isn’t it?” And she giggled.
Personally, I thought she was making a mountain out of a molehill, when it was so obvious that what I meant to say was spontaneous generation. But whatever!
Anyway, Charles Darwin was in Lamarck’s camp until he found those little finches that gave him the idea for natural selection that eventually led to that wondrous tome On the Origin of Species that really set the cat among the pigeons, so to speak.
Charles’ grandfather Erasmus Darwin had instilled in Charles the idea that species change through time, but Charles’ five weeks on the HMS Beagle in the Galapagos gave him the opportunity to observe firsthand the results of that process.
When he got back to England, he engaged a famous ornithologist John Gould, who noticed the different beaks on the finches Darwin had brought back. He identified 14 different species based on the shape of their beaks, which had evolved over time to adapt to the different foods available to the birds.
Think of all the fun we would have missed if it weren’t for those tiny little beaks. All the arguments, the fisticuffs (and isn’t THAT a great word!), the persecutions, the dialectic, as everyone fought about whether God did indeed create us, each and every one, just like the Bible tells us, or whether by some process of adaptation and natural selection, we evolved from other life forms that had come before us, in our case as humans, from a primate like the African apes.
I personally think it’s sort of cool to have an ape as my great, great, great etc. something or other, because I happen to like apes. But if you do not like apes, dear reader, you are free to choose some other life form to evolve from. Just don’t tell anybody except maybe somebody who truly loves youunconditionally.
Now if you choose something like the largest dinosaur discovered to date, that giant 130-foot long Argentinosaurus huinculensis, I would totally understand, because you do have to admit that the concept of evolution is a tectonic-plate-sized paradigm shift.
By the way, if you decide to evolve from the sea lion, I advise you to do something about their really, really smelly pee if you want any friends.
Islet Lobos has the largest concentration of sea lions in the Galapagos, and oh my! I swear you can smell that island from a mile away! The stink from the sea lion pee is fierce!
It seems that sea lions drink sea water and their livers must filter out the salt. The result is that the sea lion excretions are very acidic and stinky.
The males, or bulls, have harems, and a bull can typically retain his dominion over his harem for about six months before a younger and stronger bull will challenge him and win, taking over the harem.
Sea lion bulls are very protective of their harems, which I found out to my chagrin one day when I decided to lie down next to a young female sea lion basking in the sun on the beach. It was so totally relaxing lying there with her, pretending to be a sea lion with nothing to do but rest in the sun on a gorgeous day.
Myrtle was just preparing to do the same when she heard a walloping thrashing sound behind us and yelped in alarm to see this HUGE sea lion bull come charging out of the shallows, headed right for us.
She yanked me to my feet, and she pulled my hair in her frenzy!
But we did manage to stumble our way up the dune far enough that we thought we might be out of harm’s way, panting there sheepishly while our travel mates laughed and pointed. I stood there huffing and puffing with my hands on my knees and my first thought was, “Oh please don’t let anyone have caught this all on tape!”
But just then that bull let out such a mighty roar that I lost my footing and started tumbling back down the dune! Yikes!
Who knew that sea lion bulls can roar just as loudly and menacingly as male lions in Africa?! His message was clear: don’t even THINK about getting between me and my sweethearts during mating season.
To be continued…