purposeforporpoise

Some so-called fish stories turn out to be the real thing. In February, New Zealand fishermen plying the waters of the Ross Sea near Antarctica hauled up a real live sea monster in the very act of devouring an Antarctic toothfish.

The creature was a colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni)—yes, bigger than a merely giant squid: It weighed in at nearly half a ton and measured an estimated 33 feet. “This is the largest squid ever seen,” says Steve O’Shea, a marine biologist at the Auckland University of Technology. “But there’s no way we’ve got the maximum specimen.” http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx


Remains in the stomach of a sperm whale caught in 1925 were the first evidence of colossal squid, which are believed to inhabit the deep, freezing-cold waters around Antarctica. Sperm whales sometimes bear deep scars that may be the result of violent tussles with the razor-sharp hook rings of the squids’ tentacles.
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When they more closely examine this recent catch, O’Shea says, they will be able to determine its sex and age, which should provide a better idea of how large the elusive squid can grow. O’Shea says he’s excited by the squid carcass but would rather observe one in the wild: “I want to see it alive more than anything.”

Humpback whales migrate farther than any other mammal, say researchers who tracked them along their more than 5,000-mile route. But why do they go so far? Although some believe the humpbacks do it to avoid killer whales, these scientists conclude that water temperature alone is what guides them. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx


Researchers at the Cascadia Research Collective in Olympia, Washington, tracked seven whales—which they recognized by the markings on their tail flukes—from their summer feeding grounds in the Antarctic Ocean to their winter breeding grounds off the Pacific coast of Central America. They also determined sea surface temperatures at similar breeding grounds all over the world, using satellite readings from the National Oceanographic Data Center.
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The researchers found that humpbacks reproduce only in warm waters, 70 to 83 degrees Fahrenheit, regardless of latitude. Coastal upwelling in the Southern Hemisphere results in cool waters as far north as the equator in the Pacific, driving the whales all the way to Panama and Costa Rica for the southern winter.
The long journey, contrary to expectations, may actually end up conserving energy. Calves born in these warm waters, where they feed exclusively by nursing, can put their energy into growing rather than into keeping warm. This could make for larger adults that have more offspring.

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,” Robert Frost wrote when moved by the sight of a contemporary forest. But a coal mine in Illinois has revealed woods that, if not lovelier, are certainly darker and deeper—and a good bit older.

“You can walk in a single direction for a long distance, through this bizarre Lord of the Rings, cathedral-like thing,” says Scott Elrick, a geologist with the Illinois State Geological Survey, who studied the 300-million-year-old fossilized forest. “As you look up, you see gray flat shale, impressions on that shale, or entire trees, or tree stumps. . . . It’s the worm’s-eye view. You’re looking up at what the forest floor used to look like.” http://louis1j1sheehan.us/


The fossil ceiling, held up by 6-foot-high, 80-foot-wide pillars of coal, goes on for 4 square miles. No other known preserved forest comes close in size. And thanks to tidal rhythms, the mud deposited on top of this forest is layered, so years can be counted as with the rings of a tree. The 15 feet of sediment that blankets the fossils was laid down in four months—instantaneously in geologic time. The mine runs along a fault line, leading Elrick to surmise that an earthquake dropped one side of the fault and caused flooding. Because the subsequent influx of sediment was “not a catastrophic tsunami thing but more of a slow-motion event, all the small itty-bitty plants are in place.” http://louis-j-sheehan.de/

The slow pace at which that mud flowed in preserved an incredible diversity of flora. “We had lycopod trees 6 feet wide and 100 feet long, ground cover things, sphagnum moss, delicate little ferns next to these big, huge, honking trees. It’s crazy—we haven’t seen anything like this before,” Elrick says. At the moment, no one else is likely to see it either: The mine, now empty of coal, is closed.

When staffers from the New York State Museum dug out two massive fossils from a Catskills quarry, they solved a 130-year-old mystery. The fossils—a frond-encircled treetop and a long, slender trunk—have also forced scientists to redraw their mid-Devonian (about 385 million years ago) landscapes to include tall trees.
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The mystery was the identity of the Gilboa stumps—swollen tree-stump fossils discovered in the 1870s in the same New York county and named for the nearby town. Distinctive ridges at the base of the latest trunk fossil matched those on the old Gilboa stumps. Named Wattieza, the tree resembles modern-day palms and has usurped the conifer-like Archaeopteris as Earth’s oldest tree by some 25 million years, as reported last April in the journal Nature. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/

Given their abundance, the Gilboa stumps have long been thought to represent some kind of forest, an evolutionary first. Scientists imagined they were big, but not that big, says William Stein, paleobotanist at Binghamton University in upstate New York. At 26 feet, the fossilized trunk was three times taller than any known plant from the period. “We all have to be amazed with the scale of these things,” Stein says. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/
Size has not been the only surprise. The type of plant it was—more tree fern than conifer—forces a major rethinking of “how modern-scale forests actually came into being,” says Stein. “Here we have a plant that’s big and it’s producing a ton of [leaf] litter.” Dominant plants like Wattieza set the tone for an ecosystem during the Devonian period, which is when Earth’s modern ecology was formed, Stein says. “Wherever the plants go, the animals follow.”

Biologist Craig Venter and his team replicated a bacterium's genetic structure entirely from laboratory chemicals, moving one step closer to creating the world's first living artificial organism.

The scientists assembled the synthetic genome by stringing together chemicals that are the building blocks of DNA. The synthetic genome was constructed so it included all the genes that would be found in a naturally occurring bacterium.

The research was published in the online version of the journal Science by a team of scientists from the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md. The authors include Hamilton Smith, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1978.

"It's the second significant step of a three-step process to create a synthetic organism," said Dr. Venter, in a conference call with reporters. The final step could prove far trickier, though Dr. Venter defied his critics and deciphered the human genome with startling speed about eight years ago.

The larger quest is to make artificial life forms with a minimum set of genes necessary for life. It is hoped that such organisms could one day be engineered to perform commercial tasks, such as absorbing carbon dioxide from the air or churning out biofuels. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/


The scientific challenge of creating synthetic life isn't trivial, nor are the ethical and legal concerns. There is little government oversight, and researchers involved in such experiments regulate themselves. Detractors worry that the lack of safeguards increases the risks that a potentially dangerous man-made organism might run amok. (In creating the artificial genome of Mycoplasma, Dr. Venter's team disrupted the genes that would enable it to infect other organisms.)

Nonetheless, the science is pushing forward at a rapid pace. In June, a Venter-led team published details of an experiment in which it inserted the DNA of one species of bacteria into the cells of another bacteria species. That process almost magically "booted up" the genome of the donor bacteria, sparking it to life.

The team hopes to use a similar trick to boot up the artificially created genome, to create a man-made living organism. But, Dr. Venter said, "there are multiple barriers" to achieving that goal. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/


Dr. Venter now believes that the challenge of creating a synthetic organism is within his grasp. "I'll be...disappointed if we can't do it in 2008," he said.

Geologists and biologists know where to look for the earliest life--but the rocks are hard to read
FOR TODAY'S CIVILIZED WORLD, WITH ITS DOT-coms, sitcoms, ATMs, and ATVs, the first 3.5 billion years of life on Earth are a bit of an embarrassment. It was only a few hundred million years ago that trilobites prowled the seas. More primitive life subscribed to two or three basic lifestyles: algal mat, spineless worm, or bacterial blob. Before that, in the Archean Eon more than 2.5 billion years ago--well, that kind of life is what Lysol is for.
Scientists, of course, see it differently. "Almost everything of any biological importance happened back in the Archean," says Andrew Knoll of Harvard University, author of the upcoming book Life on a Young Planet. Soon after the infant Earth cooled down, he says, primeval microbes began processing essential elements--carbon, sulfur, and nitrogen, among others--that allowed for the eventual emergence of higher life-forms, including us. To this day, says Knoll, bacteria still do the biosphere's heavy lifting. "We just sit back and live off the fruits of their labors."
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Folks like Knoll would like to know whom to thank for those first trophic cycles. But in the quest to identify Earth's earliest life, geology can look a lot like biology. It's not always easy to tell the dead organisms from the dead ends. One of the few things experts all agree on is where to conduct the search: in the three far-flung provinces that host the world's most ancient sedimentary rocks. Deposits in Australia, Greenland, and South Africa offer a cryptic view of the earth's surface as it was between 3.2 billion and 3.8 billion years ago. The deposits are made up of layers of accumulated particles that were later buried, heated, and compressed. Rounded pebbles and smoothed sand grains in the sediments indicate that they were seabeds, so any life they record would be marine.
The oldest fossil of that life comes from a remote desert site in Western Australia called North Pole. The rocks there bear the marks of stromatolites--sizable mounds of mud and minerals trapped or precipitated by microbial colonies living in shallow ocean water. Modern stromatolites grow knee-high in Australia and the Bahamas, and the organisms that build them leave distinctive patterns in the mud pedestal that can't be duplicated by mere geologic manipulation. At North Pole, those patterns appear in rocks that are almost 3.5 billion years old. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
The sediment layers in the North Pole fossils are much finer than those in modern stromatolites, suggesting that much smaller life-forms inhabited them. Even so, there's evidence of a food chain of sorts. The principal architects of stromatolites are photosynthetic. They get their energy directly from sunlight instead of feeding off other creatures. But geochemists found the chemical signature of a microbe that was feasting on dead organic matter, a scavenger of sorts. "We had quite sophisticated ecological communities back then, even if they were just tiny little microbes," says astrobiologist Roger Buick of the University of Washington, who discovered the North Pole stromatolites.
Unfortunately, the vestiges of microbial communities are far more conspicuous than the remains of their individual members. Lacking bones, shells, teeth, and other hard parts, the first Earthlings didn't fossilize well. In the oldest rocks, chemical leftovers may be the only evidence of animation. So it happens that the earliest evidence of life is not a lithic imprint but a skewed ratio of carbon isotopes in a chunk of rock from southwest Greenland. Microscopic globules of graphite in the rock, documented in 1999 by geologist Minik Rosing at the University of Copenhagen, are unusually low in a heavy carbon isotope that gets excluded when inorganic carbon is converted into living material. Rosing thinks the C-13-poor graphite globules might have come from free-living planktonlike organisms that fell to the seafloor when they died. Their remains, he says, are at least 3.7 billion years old. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
In 1996 geochemist Stephen Mojzsis, now at the University of Colorado at Boulder, trumped Rosing's find in a report of heavy-isotope depletion in graphite grains from the Isua formation in Greenland and another site on the Greenland island of Akilia. Mojzsis says the grains are 3.85 billion years old--the oldest yet. But his interpretations of both the biological markers and the rock itself have been put through the wringer. One of Mojzsis's former coauthors, geochemist Gustaf Arrhenius of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, showed how the Isua carbon-isotopic ratio could arise by geologic activity alone, if certain iron minerals in the rock were melted and pressed together over time. He and other investigators also think that the putative sedimentary rocks are actually igneous formations that have been severely transformed by heat.
Thus, rocks of advanced vintage seem to confound even the most basic geologic distinction: igneous, metamorphic, or sedimentary? "These rocks have been buried and cooked at least three times," says Buick. "They've been severely squashed and strained and tied in knots at least three times too. Then they sat around for at least a billion years and got polished by glaciers. These are not ordinary rocks."
The ambiguity of chemical evidence leaves geologists hungry for a well-defined, and ideally photogenic, fossil or two. In the early 1990s they thought their hopes had been answered when paleobiologist William Schopf of the University of California at Los Angeles described microscopic structures embedded in a Western Australia formation almost 3.5 billion years old. In his report, dark, slender silhouettes appear in translucent sections of thinly sliced quartz. Schopf says the silhouettes are a complex carbon polymer made by chains of bacteria that may have been anchored to the seafloor. After examining hundreds of present-day microbes, he named 11 possible species in his collection and gave the back story in a 1999 book called Cradle of Life. His menagerie made the Guinness Book of World Records, as the Earth's oldest fossils. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
"I found a whole bunch of different things," says Schopf. "The question was, what were they?"
Schopf decided that at least half could be cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, the first organisms in the evolutionary record to produce oxygen. That challenges orthodox thinking about conditions on the young Earth, which would not have had a significant oxygen atmosphere for at least another billion years. When geologist Martin Brasier of the University of Oxford had a look at the structures, he decided Schopf was wrong, wrong, and wrong again. The tubes are too branched to come from bacteria, he says. The rock is an extrusion from a hydrothermal vent, not seafloor sediment. And the silhouettes are inorganic carbon injected by the vent and molded into suggestive shapes by the growth of mineral crystals. "Ancient filamentous structures should not be accepted as being of biological origin until all possibilities of their nonbiological origin have been exhausted," Brasier and his coauthors wrote in a report last year. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
The hubbub over Schopf's fossils has humbled disciples of early life. "People have become more critical about what they'll accept as evidence of biology," says Knoll. And, as demonstrated by the recent retraction of evidence for life in a Mars meteorite, the stakes are astronomical. Once biologists know where and how life emerged, astrobiologists will be better prepared to look for it elsewhere in the solar system. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/If life on Earth was a freak accident born of unique and peculiar conditions, it's probably rare elsewhere. But, says Buick, "if life can arise quickly and easily, given the right environment, there might be quite a bit of it out there."
Some of the earliest signs of life are found in ancient rock layers called banded iron formations. The iron was released by underwater volcanoes and precipitated from ocean water more than 2 billion years ago. Today the rock formations supply about 95 percent of the iron used to make steel.

Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (EDGE) Species represent a disproportionate amount of unique evolutionary history. They have few close relatives and are often extremely unusual in the way they look, live and behave. Some EDGE species, such as elephants and pandas, are well known and already receive considerable conservation attention, but many others, such as the Yangtze River dolphin (the world’s rarest cetacean), the bumblebee bat (arguably the world’s smallest mammal) and the egg-laying long-beaked echidnas are highly threatened yet remain poorly understood and are frequently overlooked by existing conservation frameworks. Recent research indicates that 70% of the world’s most threatened and evolutionarily distinct mammal species are currently receiving little or no conservation attention. Louis-J-Sheehan.org/ If these species are not highlighted and conserved we will not only lose many of the world’s unique species and a disproportionate amount of biodiversity, but we may also greatly reduce the potential for future evolution. The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) has launched a new global conservation initiative, the EDGE of Existence Programme to raise awareness and funds for the conservation of these species.

Louis J Sheehan Vaquita have never been hunted directly. Indeed their continued existence was only confirmed by a dedicated survey in 1985. However it is known that the Vaquita population is declining, and that this is due to animals becoming trapped in gillnets intended for capturing another species endemic to the Gulf, the totoaba. CIRVA, the Committee for the Recovery of the Vaquita, concluded in 2000 that between 39 and 84 individuals are killed each year by such gillnets. The Vaquita is listed by the IUCN and the Convention on International Trade in the Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora in the most critical category at risk of extinction. In order to try to prevent extinction, the Mexican government has created a nature reserve covering the upper part of the Gulf of California and the Colorado River delta. CIRVA is recommending that this reserve be extended southwards to cover the full known area of the Vaquita's range and that trawlers be completely banned from the reserve area. Even if the number of Vaquita killed by fisheries is reduced to zero, concerns remain amongst conservationists. Use of chlorinated pesticides, reduced flow of freshwater from the Colorado River due to irrigation, and depression due to inbreeding^[4] may also have a detrimental effect.
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The Vaquita is one of the top 100 EDGE Species, meaning "Evolutionarily Distinct, Globally Endangered". Evolutionarily distinct animals have no close relatives and represent proportionally more of the tree of life than other species, meaning they are top priority for conservation campaigns.

To better understand man's best friend, Hungarian scientists are working on computer software that analyzes dog barks. It could help humans recognize basic canine emotions, Hungarian ethologist Csaba Molnar told Reuters. Mr. Molnar and his colleagues at Budapest's ELTE University have tested software which distinguishes the emotional reaction of 14 dogs of the Hungarian Mudi herding breed to six situations: being alone, seeing a ball, fighting, playing, encountering a stranger or going for a walk. "A possible commercial application could be a device for dog-human communication," the scientist added. The iDog, perhaps? Louis J Sheehan

Schooling

Like other phocoenids, the Vaquita occurs singly or in small groups, usually from 1 - 3 individuals but as many as 8 - 10.

Reproduction

Most calving apparently occurs in the spring. Gestation is probably 10-11 months. Maximum observed life span was 21 years. Louis J Sheehan

Louis J Sheehan The vaquita lives in shallow, murky lagoons along the shoreline and is rarely seen in water much deeper than 30 meters; indeed, it can survive in lagoons so shallow that its back protrudes above the surface. Other characteristics of its habitat are strong tidal mixing, convection processes and high primary and secondary productivity.

Louis J Sheehan 

Doctoral student Catherine Powers traveled to fossil sites around the world, including this one in Greece, to study ancient bryozoan marine communities.


The greatest mass extinction in Earth’s history also may have been one of the slowest, according to a study that casts further doubt on the extinction-by-meteor theory.

Creeping environmental stress fueled by volcanic eruptions and global warming was the likely cause of the Great Dying 250 million years ago, said USC doctoral student Catherine Powers.

Writing in the November issue of the journal Geology, Powers and her adviser David Bottjer, professor of earth sciences at USC College, describe a slow decline in the diversity of some common marine organisms.

The decline began millions of years before the disappearance of 90 percent of Earth’s species at the end of the Permian era, Powers shows in her study.

More damaging to the meteor theory, the study finds that organisms in the deep ocean started dying first, followed by those on ocean shelves and reefs, and finally those living near shore.

“Something has to be coming from the deep ocean,” Powers said. “Something has to be coming up the water column and killing these organisms.”

That something probably was hydrogen sulfide, according to Powers, who cited studies from the University of Washington, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Arizona and the Bottjer laboratory at USC.

Those studies, combined with the new data from Powers and Bottjer, support a model that attributes the extinction to enormous volcanic eruptions that released carbon dioxide and methane, triggering rapid global warming.

The warmer ocean water would have lost some of its ability to retain oxygen, allowing water rich in hydrogen sulfide to well up from the deep (the gas comes from anaerobic bacteria at the bottom of the ocean).

If large amounts of hydrogen sulfide escaped into the atmosphere, the gas would have killed most forms of life and also damaged the ozone shield, increasing the level of harmful ultraviolet radiation reaching the planet’s surface.

Powers and others believe that the same deadly sequence repeated itself for another major extinction 200 million years ago, at the end of the Triassic era.

“There are very few people that hang on to the idea that it was a meteorite impact,” she said. Even if an impact did occur, she added, it could not have been the primary cause of an extinction already in progress.

In her study, Powers analyzed the distribution and diversity of bryozoans, a family of marine invertebrates.

Based on the types of rocks in which the fossils were found, Powers was able to classify the organisms according to age and approximate depth of their habitat.

She found that bryozoan diversity in the deep ocean started to decrease about 270 million years ago and fell sharply in the 10 million years before the mass extinction that marked the end of the Permian era.

But diversity at middle depths and near shore fell off later and gradually, with shoreline bryozoans being affected last, Powers said.

She observed the same pattern before the end-Triassic extinction, 50 million years after the end-Permian.

Powers’ work was funded by the Geological Society of America, the Paleontological Society, the American Museum of Natural History and the Yale Peabody Museum, and supplemented by a grant from USC’s Women in Science and Engineering program.

Louis J Sheehan

Most of the wild goats that ravaged this famous archipelago, denuding some islands of their vegetation, have been hunted down. The same goes for the wild pigs that ate turtle eggs and killed small animals. Now comes the biggest problem of all -- people like me.

Tourism has brought prosperity but it's also creating a new set of problems. Migrants are coming from the impoverished Ecuadorian mainland to work in the travel industry. The residents and tourists must be serviced by an ever-growing fleet of cargo ships and airplanes, which are bringing invasive species as unwanted hitchhikers.

In April, Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, declared the Galapagos, an island chain 600 miles offshore, in imminent danger. He also raised the possibility of restrictions on tourism. Pointing to unsustainable tourism development, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has put the Galapagos on its "World Heritage in Danger" list. Fewer than 4% of Unesco's sites are on this list. They could eventually lose World Heritage designation -- and the tourism draw that goes with it -- if changes aren't made.
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Stan Sesser
The place to see giant tortoises is not in the Galapagos National Park, but on private tortoise reserves on Santa Cruz Island.

"The big problem is that the Galapagos was a formerly isolated island group that suddenly became part of the whole world scene," says David Blanton, executive director of the nonprofit International Galapagos Tour Operators Association.

The other-worldliness of the Galapagos -- a moonscape inhabited by creatures that exist nowhere else on earth and act like no others -- is what gives the islands their fascination. The isolation of the Galapagos made it an ideal laboratory for the theory of evolution. Species arriving by air or ocean currents had to adapt to the unique conditions of the islands, which were formed by volcanos rising from the sea bed. This inspired Charles Darwin to draw up his theory in the mid-1800s -- that only the fittest survive by gradually changing their physical characteristics to adapt to their surroundings.

The flightless cormorants, for instance, a bird native to the Galapagos, exchanged their ability to fly for stronger legs to enhance their swimming and diving prowess. The marine iguanas, the world's only seagoing lizard, developed nasal glands to excrete salt.

Many of these native animals, particularly the large, scaly iguanas, give a prehistoric aura to the landscape. This is made more dramatic by the volcanic craters in the distance, the beds of lava dotted with lakes and interspersed with patches of cacti. The only sounds are those of nature -- the calls of birds, the barking of male sea lions establishing dominance, the grunting of giant tortoises.


Although right on the Equator, the cold Humboldt current, which flows by the Galapagos, provides teeming ocean life that supports many of the islands' species. The snorkeling here is distinguished not only by the large variety of fish, but by the chance to swim alongside tame sea lions, penguins and large sea turtles.

The islands' fragile ecosystem can be easily disrupted, particularly as the increasing number of planes and ships landing in the Galapagos bring foreign species. Whether insects, snakes or feral cats and dogs, the invaders can wreak havoc by destroying plants and other food sources, eating eggs or attacking birds or mammals.

Fire ants, for instance, have been discovered aboard ships that come from Ecuador and are small enough to slip through quarantine, says Charlotte Causton, head of the terrestrial invertebrate program for the Charles Darwin Foundation, a nonprofit group devoted to conserving the Galapagos. "They radiate out like an army," she says of the ants, which wipe out everything in their path including eggs and vegetation. Increasing quarantine inspections would help combat the problem, but inspections have dropped 20% in the past five years as the government has committed less money, says Ms. Causton.

This isn't the only problem, says Robert Bensted-Smith, a conservationist based in Quito, Ecuador, who for five years headed the Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galapagos. Many new settlers to the islands become commercial fishermen, fishing legally to supply the tourist trade or illegally for shark fins to send to Asia, all of which has an adverse impact on the marine ecosystem. Ships contribute to pollution, and their anchors damage the sea bottom. Solid-waste disposal creates dumps that can be breeding grounds for invasive species.


The threat comes despite the fact that Galapagos National Park, which encompasses more than 96% of the land on 19 islands, could serve as a textbook example of environmental consciousness. No tourist can set foot in the park without a guide, and groups are limited to 16 people. The ships that carry 100 passengers, the maximum allowed, have at least six or seven guides. Groups and their guides go ashore in separate inflatable boats, largely being kept out of each other's way on land. On their morning and afternoon excursions, passengers have to stay on designated trails, with no toilet facilities and no smoking or eating allowed.

For tourists, no matter how much they've read about the Galapagos, it is astonishing to see animals, reptiles and birds that have no fear of humans. They will allow you to come right up to them, since they haven't experienced humans as a threat. The guides rigidly enforce the rule of no interaction between visitors and wildlife -- no feeding, no petting, no noises to get them to turn around and pose for a picture.

Park authorities are putting restrictions on islands that are being degraded by overuse. On Daphne Island, for instance, only one group of 16 visitors is allowed each month because the few trails erode easily.

Because of the restrictions, there is never a feeling of being overwhelmed by a flood of tourists as, for instance, at Angkor Wat in Cambodia or Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The stark volcanic islands, whose rugged trails sometimes require rock-hopping or balancing on slippery surfaces, provide a wilderness experience that isn't marred by being part of a 100-passenger ship.
[Galapagos photo]

The ship I sailed on, Galapagos Explorer II, is the largest allowed in the islands and one of the most luxurious. These big cruise ships have come in for criticism from environmentalists for bringing a new type of tourist, more interested in luxury and in going to a trendy place.

But if the Explorer was an accurate indicator, any allegation that the passengers were more interested in cocktails on-deck than in Darwinism didn't hold water. Some of the passengers were fanatics, attending onboard lectures day and night -- with topics ranging from saving the oceans to the life of penguins. Armed with high-powered binoculars and guidebooks, the birdwatchers were a particularly hardy breed, sometimes picking out distant birds that the guides had missed.

And while the ship was certainly comfortable, the 6:30 a.m. daily wakeup call, the difficult hikes, and the absence of conventional cruise-ship entertainment like live music or nightclubs were hardly cushy. It presented an opportunity to devote each day to seeing and studying the Galapagos, and the ability to put aside all the usual distractions of daily life proved exhilarating.

Some environmentalists say President Correa's declaration of imminent danger is a positive sign. The Correa government took over in January 2007 and hasn't yet introduced any measures that directly affect tourists. But things are starting to change. The new governor of the Galapagos, known as a dedicated environmentalist, headed the national park for eight years.

Environmentalists say that the new Correa government -- unlike previous administrations, where politics and corruption frequently stifled efforts to protect the islands -- is showing a willingness to enforce existing regulations and consider new ones. "The government took ownership of the problems of the Galapagos, and this is making change possible," says Mr. Bensted-Smith, the conservationist based in Quito.
[Galapagos photo]
Yellow warbler

Steps are now being taken to tighten quarantine procedures and to keep out illegal migrants, says Mr. Bensted-Smith. The government is discussing subjects that were formerly off limits, such as stopping local boat owners from selling their tourist licenses, which can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, to outsiders. The government is also considering doubling the entrance fee for the national park to $200 a person, which would provide more money for conservation activities.

But the biggest problem so far remains unsolved: what to do about the flood of tourists. "It's not a simple solution, because to limit tourism will be to limit income," says Mauricio Castillo, an official for Unesco in Quito. In addition to restricting the number of visitors, he says that ways to channel more tourist revenue to the local islanders are now being considered, as well as raising the costs of a Galapagos trip, so that higher prices will dampen tourist numbers but still provide enough revenue.

Some of the passengers on the Explorer were facing dilemmas of their own about visiting. Several of them said that they had traveled to the Galapagos this year specifically because of President Correa's declaration.

"I've always wanted to come to the Galapagos," said a German physician, who asked that his name not be used because he didn't want to be painted as a villain. "We heard tourism will be restricted in the future, so we came now."