54 Fun Facts About Galápagos Islands

In which Russell Crowe film does the ship's doctor collect wildlife on the Galápagos?

Master and Commander: a camouflaged stick insect the doctor finds there inspires Captain Aubrey to disguise his warship as a harmless whaler.

Which explorer backed claims that pre-Columbian South Americans sailed to the Galápagos?

Thor Heyerdahl dug up pottery there, but later dating found no sign that anyone reached the islands before the Spanish did.

Pinzón Island's tortoises hatched in the wild for the first time in over a century after rangers wiped out what?

Black rats: brought by ships, they ate the eggs and hatchlings for generations, until poison bait dropped from helicopters cleared the island.

Who accidentally discovered the Galápagos Islands in 1535?

Bishop Tomás de Berlanga was sailing to Peru to settle a quarrel between Pizarro and Almagro when a calm and currents carried his ship off course.

Charles Darwin visited the islands aboard which ship?

HMS Beagle was charting coasts for the Royal Navy, so while officers surveyed the islands for five weeks, Darwin collected rocks, plants and animals.

Which American author called the Galápagos 'the Enchanted Isles' in a set of 1854 sketches?

Herman Melville had seen the islands from a whaling ship, and one of his sketches drew on a real castaway who once lived there.

Which is by far the largest island in the Galápagos?

Isabela formed when six shield volcanoes merged into one island, and it is now bigger than all the other islands combined.

Volcán Wolf, the highest peak in the islands, is named after Theodor Wolf, who was what?

A German geologist, Theodor Wolf explored the islands in 1875, and on his return Ecuador appointed him its official state geologist.

The Galápagos archipelago sits on which tectonic plate?

Nazca: the plate drifts east over the hotspot, so the oldest islands lie in the east and the youngest are still forming in the west.

Which Galápagos island is the youngest and the furthest west?

Fernandina sits over the hotspot that built the islands, which is why its volcano, La Cumbre, has erupted several times since 2009.

Which town is the most populous in the Galápagos?

Puerto Ayora took shape after US and European settlers moved there between the world wars, and it had about 12,700 people at the 2022 census.

Scientists in the submersible Alvin first discovered what on the seafloor near the Galápagos?

Hydrothermal vents: in 1977 a sudden bed of live white clams in deep-sea photos led the team straight to them.

Galápagos National Park was declared in 1959, the centenary of what?

Publication of On the Origin of Species: yet the park had no staff until 1968, when Ecuador appointed its first two conservation officers.

Roughly what share of the Galápagos' land area is protected as national park?

97%: when the park was created, only land already settled was left out, so every town and farm fits in the remaining 3%.

The Galápagos penguin is the only penguin found where?

North of the equator: a few colonies nest just across the line, where the cold, upwelling Cromwell Current keeps the water cool and full of fish.

Marine iguanas forage in the sea for what food?

Algae: being cold-blooded, marine iguanas bask on the black rocks to warm up before they can swim out to graze in the chilly sea.

How do marine iguanas get rid of the excess salt they swallow?

Sneezing it out through nasal glands: the salty spray often lands on their heads and dries into a white crust.

During El Niño famines, marine iguanas can shrink their body length by up to how much?

20%: they grow back once food returns, and scientists think the bones themselves shorten, since soft tissue alone can't explain it.

Darwin recorded that someone had nicknamed the marine iguanas what?

Imps of darkness: the phrase wasn't new, since a book about a British warship's 1824-25 voyage to Hawaii had already used it.

Which novelist imagined humans stranded on the Galápagos evolving into small-brained creatures with flippers?

Kurt Vonnegut's 1985 novel Galápagos blames humanity's troubles on its oversized brains, so evolution shrinks them.

The seabird name 'booby' comes from a Spanish word meaning what?

Fool or clown: the name probably comes from Spanish 'bobo', because these tame birds landed on ships, where sailors easily caught them.

The blue-footed booby's foot colour comes from pigments obtained from where?

From the fish they eat: carotenoid pigments in fresh fish tint the feet, so bright feet signal a well-fed bird, and females prefer them.

Flightless cormorants lost flight largely because the islands lacked what?

Land predators: with nothing to flee and food a dive away, their wings shrank to about a third of the size a bird their weight needs to fly.

The waved albatross breeds almost exclusively on which island?

Española: young albatrosses leave for several years at sea, then return to the island to court a mate with a bill-clacking dance.

Lonesome George was the last known tortoise from which island?

Pinta: a snail scientist spotted George there in 1971, and his nickname is thought to come from a character played by US comedian George Gobel.

How did giant tortoises first reach the Galápagos?

By floating: tortoises are buoyant and can stretch their necks above water, so the first ones probably drifted over from South America on currents.

Besides meat, what did 19th-century settlers and whalers mainly take from Galápagos tortoises?

Oil: settlers sold it to passing whalers, and hunting for meat and oil wiped out or nearly wiped out several islands' tortoises.

Which US city's zoo kept the Galápagos tortoise who later fathered about 900 babies for a rescue program?

San Diego: DNA tests revealed his rare species, and back in the Galápagos he fathered about 40% of the breeding program's young.

Divers visit the Galápagos to see huge schools of which shark?

Hammerhead shark: schools of hundreds gather along reefs and drop-offs by day, then the sharks move offshore to hunt at night.

Galápagos tortoise Harriet died at which celebrity's zoo?

Steve Irwin: legend said Darwin himself collected her, but DNA tests traced her to an island Darwin never visited.

About how long can a Galápagos tortoise survive without food or water?

About a year: that endurance made them living larders, so ships stacked them in their holds and took more than 100,000 over the whaling era.

Tortoises with 'saddleback' shells and long necks come from what kind of island?

Dry lowland islands with sparse ground vegetation: the raised front of the shell probably helps them stretch up to browse taller plants.

Acting governor Nicholas Lawson told Darwin he could do what on seeing a tortoise?

Say which island it came from: Darwin admitted he ignored the remark at first and had already mixed up specimens from two islands.

Post Office Bay, where whalers left mail in a wooden barrel, is on which island?

Floreana: sailors left letters for homebound ships to carry, and visitors still leave unstamped postcards in the barrel today.

The Galápagos' first known resident, a marooned sailor, was what nationality?

Irish: Patrick Watkins traded vegetables for rum with whalers, then forced five sailors to crew a stolen boat, and only he reached Guayaquil.

A prank by a crewman from which Nantucket whaleship set Charles Island ablaze in 1820?

Essex: later that year a sperm whale struck and sank the ship, a disaster her first mate, Owen Chase, wrote up in a famous account.

A buccaneer's early chart of the Galápagos named many islands after royals and nobles of which country?

England: Ambrose Cowley honoured English kings and lords, but Ecuador later swapped most of those names for Spanish ones.

During World War II, the US built an air base on Baltra, in the Galápagos, to guard what?

The Panama Canal: planes from Baltra hunted enemy submarines, and after the war settlers took the base apart to build their houses.

Which cool current flowing up from the south keeps the Galápagos surprisingly chilly?

Humboldt: its cold, nutrient-rich water carries the schooling fish that the islands' penguins depend on.

Which colour is the critically endangered land iguana found only on a single Galápagos volcano?

Pink: its whole range lies on one active volcano, leaving it exposed to eruptions, and introduced cats take its eggs and young.

Sierra Negra has the largest of what among the Galápagos volcanoes?

Caldera: guided hikes follow its rim to steaming fumaroles called the Sulphur Mine, where early settlers once dug sulphur.

Ecuador's Hermandad Marine Reserve protects a shark 'swimway' from the Galápagos toward which country's Cocos Island?

Costa Rica: after unveiling the reserve at COP26, Ecuador and three nearby countries pledged to link their marine reserves into one corridor.

The Galápagos Islands' official Spanish name honours which explorer?

Christopher Columbus: the official name is Archipiélago de Colón, but the everyday name, Galápagos, comes from the islands' giant tortoises.

Sally Lightfoot crabs have been seen performing what service for marine iguanas?

Picking ticks off them: the crabs also clean up the shore, scavenging dead animals and other scraps.

For Blue Planet II, Galápagos sea lions were filmed chasing which big fish into a cove?

Tuna: the sea lions hunt as a team, driving the fish from open water into a rocky inlet.

The Galápagos sea lion was long treated as a subspecies of which other sea lion?

California: genetic studies later showed the Galápagos animals form their own species, Zalophus wollebaeki.

The Galápagos land iguana gets most of its moisture from which plant?

Prickly-pear cactus: they eat its pads, flowers and fruit, and that moisture lets them live on islands with almost no fresh water.

Which ornithologist told Darwin his Galápagos 'blackbirds' were all finches?

John Gould showed they formed an entirely new group of finches, a finding that helped set Darwin on the road to natural selection.

Darwin's finches are famous for differing mainly in which body part?

Beaks: each shape suits a different food, from seeds to insects, and the birds aren't true finches at all but tanagers.

Which Galápagos seabird's males inflate a huge red throat pouch to attract a mate?

Frigatebird males perch in groups with the scarlet pouch blown up like a balloon, raising their bills and calling as females fly overhead and choose.

Which tanker ran aground off San Cristóbal in 2001, spilling fuel into Galápagos waters?

Jessica was carrying diesel and bunker fuel, and even the trace oil it left behind later killed marine iguanas on Santa Fe island.

UNESCO's 2007 'In Danger' listing of the Galápagos blamed invasive species, unbridled tourism and what else?

Overfishing was one of the threats, and in 2010 the World Heritage Committee took the islands off the list after finding that Ecuador had made significant progress.

Which Galápagos bird famously uses a twig as a tool to reach hidden prey?

Woodpecker finch: one adult was even seen stripping the leaves off barbed twigs, then using the barbs to drag prey out of crevices under bark.

Privateers who sailed on to the Galápagos in 1709 had rescued which castaway, a reputed model for Robinson Crusoe?

Alexander Selkirk had asked to be left ashore because he judged his ship unseaworthy, and the Cinque Ports soon foundered.