Galápagos Islands – Google pays tribute this Sunday, May 31, 2020 to the Galápagos Islands, an archipelago with unique flora and fauna, sources of inspiration for Charles Darwin’s theories on natural selection…
This Sunday, May 31, Google celebrates the Galápagos Islands in Ecuador, with a doodle, transformation of its logo which will be visible all day on the famous search engine. Famous for being the inspiration for Charles Darwin’s theories of natural selection, the Galápagos Islands are home to hundreds of unique species of plants and animals, from green turtles to fur seals. The Galápagos Islands were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site on May 31, 1978.
The Galapagos Archipelago, which straddles the equator nearly 1,000 km off the coast of Ecuador, is made up of dozens of mostly uninhabited islands and countless islets, formed by volcanic and seismic activity during many millennia (13 large islands, 17 small islands and 47 rocky islets, a total area of ??8,000 km².). Due to their unique geology and isolation, these Pacific islands are home to flora and fauna found nowhere else on the planet, including the giant tortoise first depicted in the Doodle, the largest species of living turtle. The Galápagos Islands also have the only species of penguin living north of the equator.
Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands have also been affected by the coronavirus pandemic but will reopen to tourism from July 1, Ecuadorian Vice President Otto Sonnenholzner announced on Sunday, May 31. “We can already start thinking about the future, about reactivation, that Galapagos will become the number one safe tourist destination in terms of health very soon.”
The Galápagos Islands are closely associated with British naturalist Charles Darwin, who arrived on HMS Beagle in 1835 as part of a voyage around the world that will go down in history. While there, Darwin observed closely related but highly specialized wildlife species, such as finches with distinctive beaks that specialized in their diet – now commemorated as “Darwin’s finches”.
It took Darwin more than 20 years, after first observing marine iguanas and blue-footed boobies on the islands, to synthesize his observations into his groundbreaking theories of natural selection, published in “On the Origin of Species “, in 1859. The foundations of his work remain a cornerstone of biological science to this day.
The Galápagos Islands are home to many animals and phenomena that cannot be seen anywhere else on the planet. Española Island, for example, is the only place in the world where albatrosses breed. The island is home to colonies of blue-footed boobies and masked boobies. Fernandina Island offers colonies of marine iguanas, walking cormorants (they don’t fly!), pelicans and penguins. Santa Cruz Island is home to the Charles Darwin Science Station with its population of tortoises.
Tortuga Bay is home to colonies of sea turtles, as well as the woods of giant cacti, the Los Gemelos crater and the islands capital, Puerto Ayora. At Seymour Grande you can observe a colony of sea wolves, frigatebirds and blue-footed boobies. On Bartolomé Island there are extinct craters that can be visited and from which you can discover exceptional views of the island.
