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Giant tortoises, the life-giving engineers of remote small island ecosystems, are plodding over the Gal\u00e1pagos island of Floreana for the first time in more than 180 years.<\/p>\n
The Floreana giant tortoise (Chelonoidis niger niger<\/em>), a subspecies of the giant tortoise once found across the Gal\u00e1pagos, was driven to extinction in the 1840s by whalers who removed thousands from the volcanic island to provide a living larder during their hunting voyages.<\/p>\n Remarkably, 158 juvenile giant tortoises descended from the Floreana subspecies have been returned to the island in a vital step for the largest ecological restoration project undertaken on the Pacific Ocean archipelago.<\/p>\n A relic population of giant tortoises discovered on Wolf volcano<\/a> in the north of Isabela Island in 2008 were found to be descended in part from the Floreana population<\/a>. Most of the Wolf volcano tortoises had domed shells like those living on Isabela\u2019s other volcanoes to the south, but some had a saddleback-shaped carapace more typical of the tortoises that evolved on Floreana.<\/p>\n A captive \u201cback breeding\u201d programme<\/a> began in 2017, for which 23 hybrid tortoises most closely related to the Floreana subspecies were chosen to recreate it as genetically close to the original as possible.<\/p>\n More than 600 hatchlings had been born by 2025, and several hundred grew large enough to be returned to their ancestral island. Males can reach nearly 1.5 metres (5ft) in length.<\/p>\n <\/gu-island><\/p>\n Although whalers wiped out the Floreana tortoise, it ironically endured on Wolf volcano because they also deposited live tortoises on other islands for safekeeping and sometimes tossed tortoise cargo overboard if they needed to lighten their load during their whaling missions.<\/p>\n Floreana, the sixth largest island in the archipelago, was once home to a wealth of endemic wildlife, including spectacular species such as the Floreana mockingbird<\/a>, the Floreana racer snake<\/a>. But the arrival of sailors, whalers and then settlers brought invasive mammals including rats and feral cats that wiped out native fauna and flora, a pattern repeated on small islands across the world<\/a>. When Charles Darwin reached Floreana in 1835, its giant tortoise population was in its death throes.<\/p>\n Its reintroduction has been brought about by the Floreana Ecological Restoration Project<\/a>, a partnership between the Gal\u00e1pagos national park directorate<\/a> and a number of charities<\/a> working closely with the island\u2019s 160 residents.<\/p>\n An invasive species eradication programme, which began in 2023 and has removed most of the rats and feral cats on the island, paved the way for the tortoises\u2019 return.<\/p>\n