Herman Melville, who visited the Galapagos in
1837, just after Darwin, took a bleak view of the archipelago's
fauna:
| "Another feature
in these isles is their emphatic uninhabitableness....Little
but reptile life is here found: - tortoises, lizards, immense
spiders, snakes, and the strangest anomaly of outlandish
Nature, the aguano. No voice, no low, no howl is heard;
the chief sound of life here is a hiss." |
While "immense spiders" certainly are
not reptiles, the Galapagos Islands are indeed known for their
rich reptilian population, beginning with the giant
tortoises, the "galapagos" from which the archipeligo
derives its name. It was the giant tortoises, with 11 subspecies
scattered about the archipelago, that first called Darwin's
attention to the amazing diversity of the Galapagos wildlife.
Sea turtles also call the Galapagos home. The most commonly
seen sea turtle is the green sea turtle, which is considered to be endangered
throughout its range, except in the Galapagos.
Lizards are represented by three major types
- the iguanas, the lava lizards,
and the geckos. The iguanas fall into two basic genera represented
by the marine iguana and the
land iguana. There are two types
of land iguana, usually considered different species, although
there are some data to suggest that the two are actually different
races of the same species. The lava lizards consist of a single
genus, Tropidurus, divided into seven species scattered
among most of the islands.Lastly, there are three endemic species
of snake.
|
