[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I am Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today we begin on a plane.

ROBERT: Thank you, Brooke.

JAD: Which carried our newly-married producer Tim Howard to the Galapagos.

TIM HOWARD: So I took the plane from Quito. We had just finished our honeymoon that morning, me and Brooke. They make announcements, and at a certain point the flight attendants, they open up all of the overhead bins and they walk up and down spraying some sort of insecticide.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: For what? For like a ...

ROBERT: Invasive species, I think.

TIM: Yeah, like whatever bugs might have snuck on the plane. By this point I'm getting super excited, and I'm thinking about Darwin, and I start reading Voyage of the Beagle, his book on this Nook that I had bought for the trip. But then my power supply didn't work, and my Nook died.

JAD: That was a big problem for Darwin too. He kept running out of power.

ROBERT: His Nook, oh gosh.

TIM: And then the islands come into sight.

ROBERT: What is the color of the Pacific Ocean when you look out the plane window?

TIM: That was actually the first thing I noticed. It's this totally wild—like, I've never seen, like, this storybook blue-green iridescent aquamarine. And I'm thinking, like, "Wow! This is gonna be like dropping into another world." You know, like, nature in its purest form.

ROBERT: My version was—is my dream of what it would be like is you land and it's sort of like low, grassy knoll, and an enormous turtle comes by, one that you could sit on the top of and it wouldn't notice that you were there.

JAD: Just kind of meets you at the airport?

ROBERT: Just wandering by.

TIM: Exactly. That's very similar to what I was picturing. But we land, we take the 40-minute bus ride to Puerto Ayora.

ROBERT: Ay—Ayora.

TIM: Puerto Ayora.

ROBERT: Ayora.

TIM: Puerto Ayora. Which turns out to be kind of a big town, tons of people live there.

ROBERT: Tons like a fishing village tons?

TIM: No, it's way bigger than a fishing village. And just let me say that my first hours in Galapagos were totally different than I was expecting. Sort of the first thing that really just like, "Where the hell am I?" I—I'm walking through the town, it's kinda late.

TIM: The sun is just starting to set.

TIM: I'm actually walking down Charles Darwin Avenue.

[dog barking]

TIM: Just kind of getting the lay of the land, when all of a sudden ...

[cars honking rhythmically]

TIM: ... this line of cars comes around the corner honking, endless honking. And they're waving flags, blue flags. At first, I didn't know what the hell was happening, but turns out it was an election rally. And I was just really blown away that this continued, this procession, for like 15 minutes.

TIM: And I remember asking one guy, they were driving so slow I could just walk up to them. I asked him, "Who's your candidate?" And they're like ...

[supporters talking]

TIM: I didn't know who the guy was, but turns out he was the incumbent and I'm like, "Is he gonna win?" And this guy he, like, doesn't even say anything. He just kind of points. He, like, points at the cars in front and behind as if like, "Dude, seriously? You see how many of us there are?" But then at a certain point, I noticed this one guy by himself standing on the sidewalk wearing a white shirt and jeans. He's waving a flag, but his flag is a different color—it's white. And it's really loud, but I go up to him and I yell at him, "Who's your candidate?" And he said, "I am a candidate."

TIM: And I'm like, "What? Are you—seriously?" So his name is Leonidas. He is a naturalist guide. You actually end up meeting a lot of people employed that way in Galapagos. And he tells me ...

LEONIDAS PARALES: So I am outsider politico.

TIM: Politically speaking, he's an outsider. And of course, I'm wondering why he's standing there by himself waving a flag at this entire parade of people who don't support him at all. And he tells me "Well, I'm nervous. If the party in power now, the front runners, if they get elected, then I see a dark and uncertain future. More big hotels, more of these enormous boats, more people. And if things keep going this way, then who's gonna stand up for nature?"

JAD: This is Radiolab, and we are dedicating the entire hour to this little set of islands, and to that question.

ROBERT: As the world is filling up with more and more and more people, is it inevitable that even the most sacred, pristine places on the planet will eventually get swallowed up?

JAD: And how far are we willing to go to return a place to what it was before we got there?

ROBERT: And more importantly, can we?

LINDA CAYOT: Oh, I'm never a doubter. [laughs]

TIM: Okay, so this is Linda.

LINDA CAYOT: Linda Cayot. Currently the science advisor for Galapagos Conservancy. I began my work in Galapagos in 1981.

TIM: She first came to study tortoises.

LINDA CAYOT: Back then, you know, Galapagos was really isolated.

TIM: Barely any cars, super limited electricity.

LINDA CAYOT: All I remember is having a smile on my face all the time because, you know, as a biologist, going to Galapagos is like going to Mecca.

TIM: She says you have islands with massive volcanoes and forests.

LINDA CAYOT: Tree ferns that grow, you know, well above a human's height.

MATTHIAS ESPINOSA: Yeah, I mean powerful colors. You know, there's green mangrove, black lava flows and pink flamingos.

TIM: This is Mattias Espinosa.

MATTHIAS ESPINOSA: A naturalist guide in the Galapagos.

TIM: And like Linda, he says that when he first got to the Galapagos in the '80s, he couldn't believe that the place was real.

MATTHIAS ESPINOSA: It was breathtaking.

TIM: He visited an island called ...

MATTHIAS ESPINOSA: Fernandina. And the first thing that I saw was a lava flow that was moving. I was like, "What's going on?" You know, no, that's not lava flow, that's like one thousand sea iguanas taking a sunbath.

TIM: And he says he would go on these dives.

MATTHIAS ESPINOSA: Can you imagine? Schools of hammerhead sharks, like 500, 800 passing in front of you like tuna, like sardines. It shows you the power. It shows you also the evolution there is where evolution's very strong.

TIM: Okay, so quick context: Galapagos Islands, cluster of islands, way off the coast of Ecuador in the Pacific. 19 bigger islands, bunch of smaller ones. And this is the place, of course, where Darwin landed in 1835. And as he went island to island, he started noticing that there were all these creatures that were really similar to each other, but also a little bit different. The tortoises had different shells, depending on the kind of island they lived on. The finches look similar, but their beaks were always a little bit different. And this gets him thinking: what if it isn't the way that everybody always says? What if God didn't create every single species in the beginning and leave them unchanged? What if, in fact, life is purely change? What if everything has been changing all the time? Darwin's five weeks on Galapagos push him to develop his theory of evolution, and that's also why when we think of evolution we think of the Galapagos, and in particular, we think of two iconic creatures: the tortoise and the finch.

TIM: Let me start by telling you about the tortoise.

TIM: It's hot, it's bright. It's such a perfect day for tortoise hunting, or not hunting but, you know, looking for.

TIM: Fourth day I was there, I went to the island of Floreana which Darwin visited. And there up in the highlands, basically in the middle of this yard ...

TIM: Oh my God! There are these three massive tortoises just clustered together under a tree. Wow, that is freaking amazing!

JAD: Describe them. What do they look like?

TIM: These are such alien-looking creatures.

TIM: They're like the size of—jeez, I don't even know what. They're massive. They look like they would crush you to death.

TIM: I wonder how many years these guys have been here for?

TIM: They can live for over 150 years.

ROBERT: Wow!

TIM: There's a tortoise trying to get over a branch.

[breathing sounds]

JAD: What was that?

TIM: That is the sound of a tortoise breathing.

[breathing sounds]

JAD: That's cool.

TIM: So Linda, when she first went to Galapagos to study these tortoises about 30 years ago ...

LINDA CAYOT: I did a trip where we backpacked around the caldera.

TIM: She took a trip to this island called Isabela, hiked up the side of a volcano.

LINDA CAYOT: And looked at all the tortoise country. And it was an impenetrable forest.

TIM: Basically, tortoise heaven.

LINDA CAYOT: And what makes it so perfect for tortoises is, in the dry season in Galapagos, the garua, which is a very, very thick mist, comes onto the island.

TIM: It rolls over this forest.

LINDA CAYOT: And it catches in the branches of the trees.

TIM: The water then drips down from the top of the trees down to the ground ...

LINDA CAYOT: Creating what we call drip pools which provides tortoises with water during the dry season, and they like to rest in water.

TIM: And so there under the trees, you have these ponds with dozens of tortoise domes just rising out of the water.

LINDA CAYOT: So that was my first experience. It was a magical magical area. And then I actually didn't get back there for maybe 15 years from when I was there the first time. And when I returned, that forest was 100 percent gone. The drip pools were just dry dust bowls.

TIM: Wow.

LINDA CAYOT: There was no shade.

KARL CAMPBELL: Tortoises were sitting out in the sun, or crowded around the couple of stalks that were still there.

TIM: This is Karl Campbell.

KARL CAMPBELL: I work for Island Conservation, and I'm based here in the Galapagos Islands.

TIM: Karl's actually the guy who showed me those tortoises.

KARL CAMPBELL: It was just a—you know, it was a barren landscape.

LINDA CAYOT: Yeah. Barren, barren grounds.

TIM: What happened to the forest?

LINDA CAYOT: Goats.

KARL CAMPBELL: Goats.

JAD: That was definitely not what I thought you were gonna say. I thought you were gonna say people.

TIM: It was kind of a collaboration. So here's the story.

KARL CAMPBELL: Goats were originally sort of brought to the Galapagos probably by pirates and whalers.

TIM: Back in the 1500s, you had tons of sailors making these long voyages across the Pacific.

KARL CAMPBELL: And Galapagos was, you know, the major port on the whaling route where you'd come and get fresh water, but you'd also come in and pick up tortoises, land tortoises. And, you know, boats would take away several hundred of them often and turn them upside down, and they can last for up to a year and a half in the hold of a ship.

TIM: Like lying there upside down?

KARL CAMPBELL: Yeah, lying there upside down.

TIM: In order to make space for the tortoises, the whalers and pirates would often take goats that they'd brought with them and throw them onto the islands. That way, when they're on their way back and sick of eating tortoises, they could grab those goats. So whalers and buccaneers, they introduced goats to Galapagos, but on islands like Isabela, which is this massive island the size of Rhode Island, the goats were actually penned in to just a little part of it because there was this black lava rock that ran across the island.

LINDA CAYOT: Extremely rough lava that's extremely difficult to walk across.

TIM: 12 miles of it.

LINDA CAYOT: So that had acted as a barrier.

TIM: Basically with goats on one side, tortoises on the other. But according to Linda ...

LINDA CAYOT: Sometime in the late 1970s ...

TIM: ... the goats got brave.

LINDA CAYOT: I mean, we're probably talking just a few goats, but by the 1990s, those few goats, the population had exploded to about 100,000 goats.

TIM: Wow.

LINDA CAYOT: And if you think of 100,000 goats eating everything in their path ...

TIM: Every sort of plant, like, even the bark off of trees.

LINDA CAYOT: They destroy the forest.

TIM: So now they had a dilemma. You know, on the one hand, the tortoises needed help. On the other hand, you had all of these goats that didn't choose to be on the island. You know, it wasn't their fault.

LINDA CAYOT: And the goats that were out there were gorgeous. You know, they had curled horns, different-colored fur, just beautiful animals.

TIM: And they've been there for 500 years.

KARL CAMPBELL: Some people were concerned, you know, with goats have their own sort of, if you will, right to be there. Those arguments came up frequently.

TIM: To which Karl would respond ...

KARL CAMPBELL: Yeah. Are we going to let tortoises go extinct? You know, there's thousands of islands around the world that have goats on them.

TIM: These tortoises are only found here.

KARL CAMPBELL: So where do your values lie?

LINDA CAYOT: And so in 1994, we had what we called the tortoise summit in England, and that was where we started the discussions about what are we gonna do.

TIM: Experts came from all over the world. Linda says, "We want to get rid of the goats."

LINDA CAYOT: And many of them thought we were nuts and that it was impossible.

TIM: There's 100,000 of them!

LINDA CAYOT: So many doubters.

TIM: Karl says he even heard the idea ...

KARL CAMPBELL: Why don't you put lions? You know, they eat goats in Africa. You know, why don't you get lions on there? And those are really interesting ideas, but at some point, they're gonna get hungry and they're gonna start eating all the other things that, you know, you treasure like the occasional tourist.

TIM: In any case, after endless planning and meetings ...

LINDA CAYOT: It took eight years, I think.

TIM: ... they commence Project Isabela.

FRASER SUTHERLAND: So the helicopters we used, they're called MD-500s. Small helicopter—they're for four passengers and one pilot. Single turbine, five blades.

TIM: This is Fraser.

FRASER SUTHERLAND: Fraser Sutherland. I was the engineer, pilot and sharpshooter, 2004 through to 2006.

TIM: Almost every day during that time, Fraser would fly over Isabela Island, two guys with ...

FRASER SUTHERLAND: Two shooters, either side of the helicopter. What you do is, so you come across and you're flying along, and you might see one goat.

TIM: Says you follow that goat as it ran away until it joined its friends.

FRASER SUTHERLAND: So you have to find all those other goats.

TIM: Circle real low.

FRASER SUTHERLAND: You'd fly around them.

TIM: Round them up.

FRASER SUTHERLAND: Try and get them in a single group.

TIM: And then you'd start picking off the goats one by one by one. And there are actually videos online where you see these packs of goats running for their lives, and then dropping to the ground.

LINDA CAYOT: The last goat or two might sort of run into an area where it's impossible to reach.

FRASER SUTHERLAND: I'd actually go into caves, and what we'd do is we'd find a location as close as we could or right on top of the cave, drop out one of the two shooters that was in the helicopter, and he'd physically go into the cave, shoo the goats out or shoot them on sight.

LINDA CAYOT: And then you go on.

TIM: And actually, in under a year through this aerial attack, they end up wiping out 90 percent of the goats on Isabela.

JOSH DONLAN: But to give an example of the nature of this business ...

TIM: That's Josh Donlan. He runs an NGO that was involved in Project Isabela.

JOSH DONLAN: It's relatively easy to remove 90 percent of a goat population from an island. But as they become rarer and rarer, they're harder and harder to detect.

TIM: The goats become quote, "Educated." They learn that this sound ...

[helicopter flying]

TIM: ... means ...

[gunshot]

TIM: So the goats start hiding.

FRASER SUTHERLAND: So they go into bushes, they won't move.

TIM: They learn to stand under a tree holding their breath.

JOSH DONLAN: And so you end up flying around in an expensive helicopter not finding any goats. Now the way we deal with that is an interesting one, we use this technique called "Judas goats."

KARL CAMPBELL: Yeah, Judas goats.

TIM: Initially, it was Karl's suggestion.

KARL CAMPBELL: Because goats are gregarious and like being in groups.

JOSH DONLAN: They're herd animals, right? And so the technique that we would use was you would fire up your helicopter, you'd fly around, you'd find some goats.

KARL CAMPBELL: You'd capture goats.

JOSH DONLAN: Capture them live.

KARL CAMPBELL: And then come back.

TIM: Back to base camp.

KARL CAMPBELL: Offload them.

JOSH DONLAN: And you'd put a radio collar on them, and you'd throw them back on the island.

TIM: And then you wait. Instinctively ...

KARL CAMPBELL: That lone goat will go and find other goats.

JOSH DONLAN: A week, two weeks go by, you fire up the helicopter.

TIM: They get back over the island with this little device.

JOSH DONLAN: It's a directional antenna.

TIM: Start tracking the Judas goat, 'til they spot it with some other goats.

JOSH DONLAN: And then everyone gets shot except the Judas goat.

TIM: They let it go, it finds more friends ...

JOSH DONLAN: And then everyone gets shot except the Judas goat.

TIM: And then they do it again.

JOSH DONLAN: Everyone gets shot except the Judas goat. And you'd do that every two weeks for a year.

JAD: Oh my God!

TIM: And that is how they go from 90 percent goat-free to 91 to 92 to 93 to 94.

ROBERT: It's like having a pogrom on you over and over and over again.

JAD: I know. It's like a—Jesus!

TIM: It gets worse.

JOSH DONLAN: Now a Judas goat is a good Judas goat until it gets pregnant.

TIM: Because then it doesn't want to be social anymore.

JOSH DONLAN: It goes off and has its kid and is very solitary, which is the last thing you want when you're trying to get goats off islands.

TIM: So Karl kept mulling this problem.

KARL CAMPBELL: What would it take to basically make, you know, the perfect Judas goat? The ideal Judas goat if you will, is a goat that would search for and be searched for.

TIM: And that would never get pregnant.

JOSH DONLAN: So Karl Campbell figured out a technique where we could sterilize them in the field.

TIM: They'd grab the goats, dart them. And then in a matter of minutes.

JOSH DONLAN: Snip snip.

TIM: Did you do this?

JOSH DONLAN: Yeah. Well, I stood next to Karl and watched him do it. [laughs] And Karl took it one step further, and he actually gave these females hormone implants ...

TIM: That basically put them into heat ...

KARL CAMPBELL: ... for an extended duration.

TIM: Normally a female goat would be in heat for maybe a couple days. These females would go ...

KARL CAMPBELL: ... for more than 180 days.

TIM: And wherever they went, they would lure those male goats out of their caves so that, you know ...

[gunshots]

TIM: All in all, over the course of this two-year program ...

JOSH DONLAN: We had hundreds of Judas goats out.

TIM: And using those goats, they were able to go from 94 percent goat free to 96 to 97 to 98.

KARL CAMPBELL: And basically, when you have only Judas goats meeting up with other Judas goats ...

JOSH DONLAN: ... then you can say the goats have been eliminated.

KARL CAMPBELL: That you're done.

TIM: A point they got to, at least on Isabela, in mid-2006.

LINDA CAYOT: This kind of eradication program was far beyond anything that anyone had ever done anywhere in the world.

TIM: Because it turns out they weren't just doing this on Isabela Island.

JOSH DONLAN: No, we're talking about island by island.

TIM: Over the course of about seven years, they eliminate over 250,000 goats.

TIM: So you complete that with Isabela. And did it work?

KARL CAMPBELL: Yeah, the results of this were absolutely impressive.

JOSH DONLAN: You had plants re-emerging. You had trees growing back.

KARL CAMPBELL: And in a really short period of time.

TIM: And this allowed for those important drip pools. And tortoises, they basically got their home back.

TIM: This is the real thing. Tortoises walking around. ¡Es increíble!

JAD: So they did it. They got all the goats.

TIM: Not all the goats.

ROBERT: What do you mean?

TIM: Those Judas goats? They kept them around.

ROBERT: Why?

JAD: I would just—I would have shot them first just out of sympathy for them.

ROBERT: Yeah, exactly.

TIM: Well, they needed the goats because well, there was the problem of people.

[sound of protesters]

TIM: Because during the '90s, these demonstrations started to happen.

[NEWS CLIP: Demonstrations of outrage and violent activity. Constant conflict.]

TIM: To explain ...

AUGUSTIN LOPEZ: Lo que pasa es que la época de que esto de pa pesca.

TIM: This is Augustin Lopez, a long-time fisherman. And he told me that in the '70s and '80s, lobster was fished all year round, no restrictions. And then fishermen started making a killing fishing sea cucumber because there was this huge demand. But then the national park comes in—same group that's doing the goat eradication, and they tell the fishermen they're overfishing the sea cucumber. They've got to limit their catch. And the fishermen are like, "Who are you to tell me that I can't feed my family." So they lash out.

[sound of protesters]

TIM: They march down Charles Darwin Avenue.

PAUL WATSON: They would come down the street throwing rocks and sticks and everything.

TIM: That's Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. He was there counter-protesting, and he says that at one point, they went after national park buildings.

PAUL WATSON: And they were attacking the ranger stations with Molotov cocktails.

TIM: They blockaded roads.

PAUL WATSON: They literally drove the rangers out of the national park headquarters and took it over.

TIM: On Isabela, they burned down a building.

PAUL WATSON: They kidnapped some people, including some of my crew.

TIM: And they even killed dozens of tortoises, slitting their throats. According to some accounts, they even hung them from trees. Not only that, but according to Linda, those goats?

LINDA CAYOT: Couple islands where they've been eliminated, fishermen have put them back.

TIM: Really?

LINDA CAYOT: Oh yeah.

TIM: And so what they decided to do is leave the Judas goats on various islands where they can live out their sterilized days chomping on grass, sharing war stories, until such time as they might be needed again.

ROBERT: Is the war between the Greens and the—and the fishermen and such, is that still hot and difficult? And are they still, you know, killing tortoises and ...?

TIM: They're not. The fishermen, they seem to have stopped, you know, taking over national parks and killing tortoises.

ROBERT: Do you know why?

TIM: It's a combination of reasons. On the one hand, fishermen have started to participate in the actual fisheries management more, because it seems like they realize if they're gonna keep their livelihood, they can't just fish everything out. But then at the same time, the tourism economy has been taking off, and so all of these fishermen, they find that it's easier for them to actually survive by using their boats to take tourists around island to island. So they're all kind of converting over into the tourism economy.

ROBERT: Huh.

JAD: We're gonna take a short break. This is Radiolab. We'll be back with producer Tim Howard and this hour on Galapagos in just a moment.

[LINDA CAYOTE: Hi, this is Linda Cayote.]

[JOSH DONLAN: Hey, this is Josh Donlan.]

[LINDA CAYOTE: Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation ...]

[JOSH DONLAN: ... and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation ...]

[LINDA CAYOTE: ... enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.]

[JOSH DONLAN: More information about Sloan at www ...]

[LINDA CAYOTE: ... at www.sloan.org.]

[JOSH DONLAN: Sloan.org.]

[LINDA CAYOTE: Bye!]

[JOSH DONLAN: Ciao.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

-30-

 

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