Galápagos Nature Nonprofits

The Galápagos are where the theory of evolution was assembled. Darwin spent five weeks here in 1835 and left with the observations, particularly about the finches and the tortoises varying from island to island, that would take him another twenty years to understand and would then reorganise biology entirely. The islands remain a working laboratory, one of the few places where evolution has been observed happening within a human lifetime.

They are volcanic, young, and biologically strange: marine iguanas that dive for algae, cormorants that gave up flight, penguins living on the equator because a cold current brings them there. The isolation that made all this also makes it fragile, and introduced goats, rats, and cats have been the historic threat, along with fishing pressure and the sheer weight of visitors.

The organizations here run eradication programmes that have cleared invasive mammals from entire islands, an achievement of remarkable difficulty, restore tortoise populations, and defend a marine reserve that is one of the largest and most important in the world against industrial fleets waiting at its boundary.