As we've blogged before on Big Think, the state of science savvy in America is pretty sorry. Only about a third of us accept evolution through natural selection, even lower than the tally that accepts human-caused global warming as a reality. Do we all need to take a science field trip for inspiration, say to the Galapagos Islands, the legendary birthplace of Charles Darwin's singular notion? No. In fact, we're ruining the place.
The Galapagos is already a fragile place, an archipelago formed by fairly recent volcanic activity. And the same geographic isolation that causes the evolution of the peculiar wildlife also means they have nowhere to go to escape disaster. And now, thanks to human travel, the Galapagos face the threat of invasive species.
Mosquitoes are the current villain. Southern house mosquitoes, to be exact. They've reached the archipelago aboard our ships and planes, and managed to survive by breeding with the native mosquitoes. And where there are mosquitoes, disease often follows.
Southern house mosquitoes are known to carry avian pox, malaria, and West Nile virus. If any of those diseases arrived in the Galapagos and spread around the mosquito population, those mosquitoes could pass on the disease to the islands' rare and historic wildlife and wipe them out. It happened in Hawaii in the 1800s, killing off many native bird species.
Tourism forms and increasingly large part of the Galapagos' economy, but the islands face the same problems that plague any tourist destination—tourism ruins the thing people go to see, either aesthetically by overcrowding the area with people in bad T-shirts, or through causing real, irrevocable damage.
Discuss
James Scalone on August 13, 2009, 1:00 AM
People will use the resourses that are available to them. People who live off the land or sea develop a relative sense of value for the resourses available to them. For instance at one level a person might kill a gorilla to eat it. At the next level they might kill a gorilla to sell the meat so others can eat it. At the next level they lear that they can sell the meat and the hide and the hands and other parts. It takes a fair amount of experience, usually the experience of more than one person, the experience of a community, to get to the level of value such that the person sees that if he does not kill the gorilla then tourists come and create jobs and and garner political and financial and attention that that both improves the standard of living for the person and preserves the gorillas.
The Galapagos has certainly risen to that level. There are still some fishermen and hunters who try to fish and hunt there undetected because they do not see the value of preserving the Galapagos. Take away the tourists and there may be fewer mosquitos but there will be more people exploiting the resourses of the Galapagos and therefore fewer of the unique animals.
I doubt that there is a perfect solution to the issue of spreading microbes and insects. Preventing tourists from going to the Galapagos islands is unlikely to be effective because the locals still travel back and forth to the mainland as to fishermen and scientists.
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