Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Last week's episode on Very Old Animals kept
Speaker 1: reminding me of our previous episode on endlings. That's a
Speaker 1: word that's been coined to describe the last known surviving
Speaker 1: members of a species. So we're bringing our episode out
Speaker 1: on some endlings as Today's Saturday Classic. This episode originally
Speaker 1: came out on February twenty first, twenty eighteen in Joy
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio. Hello and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. On February twenty first, nineteen eighteen,
Speaker 1: a bird named Incas died at the Cincinnati Zoo. Incas
Speaker 1: was a Carolina parakeet and his mate, Lady Jane, had
Speaker 1: died the year before. They were the last of their species.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen nineties, physician Robert Webster of Jasper, Georgia
Speaker 1: coined a name for the last living member of a species,
Speaker 1: which was endling, and so the word he realized the
Speaker 1: need for while he was treating a patient who told
Speaker 1: him that she was the last living member of her
Speaker 1: family line. Endling isn't in Merriam Webster or the Oxford
Speaker 1: English Dictionary as of when we recording the show, but
Speaker 1: it's been picked up by museums and journals and magazines
Speaker 1: and their discussions of last animals, especially ones that people
Speaker 1: cared enough about to name and then write about them
Speaker 1: when they died. So a few other examples of these
Speaker 1: endlings are booming. Ben the heath hen who was last
Speaker 1: seen on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts on March eleventh, nineteen thirty two. Benjamin,
Speaker 1: the last Tasmanian tiger, died on September seventh, nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: six at the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania. And some of
Speaker 1: these are really recent. Tufie, who was the last known
Speaker 1: RABS fringe limbed tree frog, died on September twenty sixteen
Speaker 1: at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens Frog Pod Laboratory for Amphibian Conservation.
Speaker 1: So since we're coming up on the centennial of its
Speaker 1: extinction today, we're going to talk about the Carolina parakeet,
Speaker 1: along with two other endlings who were marked, the Passenger
Speaker 1: pigeon and Lonesome George, the Penta Island tortoise. Just in
Speaker 1: case not clear this episode would get the I think
Speaker 1: they've changed the way they do these ratings, but it
Speaker 1: used to be at doesthdog dye dot com. There would
Speaker 1: be a sad face of a dog. Yeah. If the
Speaker 1: dog died this this would have like all sad faces.
Speaker 1: This whole episode is about animals dying. Yeah. Uh. Once
Speaker 1: upon a time, Eastern North America had its own native
Speaker 1: parrot species Consis carolinensis, better known as the Carolina parakeet,
Speaker 1: or sometimes the Carolina parrot. A subspecies Counterropsis carolinensis ludovicianis,
Speaker 1: was sometimes known as the Louisiana parakeet, but in writings
Speaker 1: about them, they're generally grouped together, just as the Carolina parakeet.
Speaker 1: It is not clear who coined the term Carolina parakeet,
Speaker 1: but it was some time after the Carolina Colony was
Speaker 1: chartered in sixteen sixty three. The birds first mentions in
Speaker 1: writing date back to the fifteen eighties, obviously without the
Speaker 1: Carolina moniker as part of them. In sixteen twelve, William
Speaker 1: Stratchy described them this way in the History of Travel
Speaker 1: into Virginia, Britanna. Quote parakeitos. I have seen many in
Speaker 1: the winter and known diverse killed. Yet they be a
Speaker 1: foul most swift of wing, Their wings and breasts are
Speaker 1: of a greenish color with forked tails. Their heads some crimson,
Speaker 1: some yellow, some orange, tawny, very beautiful. You'll just have
Speaker 1: to imagine the seventeenth century spelling of that passage, because
Speaker 1: it's delightful. It is, and it's one of those green
Speaker 1: examples that reminds me of the episode we did about
Speaker 1: how language shifts and the rules are made up, uh huh,
Speaker 1: because there's some fast and loose spelling that changes from
Speaker 1: mention to mention there, and I love it. My favorite
Speaker 1: is that they are very beau t y f ull
Speaker 1: It's like the way little kids say beautiful. Of course,
Speaker 1: North America's indigenous people already had their own names for
Speaker 1: these birds, and they're represented in indigenous art going back
Speaker 1: to prehistory, including in pipes and calcite and hematite ornaments.
Speaker 1: Their feathers and other parts were also used in native
Speaker 1: clothing and ornaments. Most sources describe the bird's range as
Speaker 1: covering almost all of the eastern United States, but research
Speaker 1: that was published in twenty seventeen suggests that the Carolina
Speaker 1: and Louisiana subspecies really had smaller ranges that didn't really
Speaker 1: overlap each other very much. According to this research, Carolina
Speaker 1: parakeets lived all through Florida and then in coastal regions
Speaker 1: from Texas up to Virginia. Louisiana parakeets lived in the
Speaker 1: central part of the country in a squarish blob with
Speaker 1: the southwest corner in central Texas and the northeast corner
Speaker 1: in central Ohio. These were bright green birds, roughly twelve
Speaker 1: inches or thirty centimeters long. Juveniles were green all over,
Speaker 1: and as they matured their heads turned yellow, with little
Speaker 1: reddish orange masks along their eyes, running down beside their beaks,
Speaker 1: and across the tops of their heads. In the words
Speaker 1: of James Hall, writing in eighteen thirty eight, they were
Speaker 1: quote a bird of beautiful plumage, but very bad character.
Speaker 1: But their character probably got a lot worse after the
Speaker 1: arrival of European colonists in North America. I really yearned
Speaker 1: to know what gave the bad care. Were they just sassy?
Speaker 1: Were they really about food? That's the next thing that
Speaker 1: we're talking about. I like it. It's like a far
Speaker 1: side cartoon, right with like the birds from the wrong
Speaker 1: side of the tracks kind of thing. In my head.
Speaker 1: That's how this plays out Carolina parakeets ate fruit plants,
Speaker 1: some insects, and a lot of seeds, and they were
Speaker 1: particularly fond of cocklebar seeds. So cocklebars are native to
Speaker 1: North America, but they're invasive in other parts of the world,
Speaker 1: and even in North America, these plants are annoying since
Speaker 1: they're covered in prickly, clinging seed pods. Cockle Bars didn't
Speaker 1: really run rampant in pre colonial forests, but once colonists
Speaker 1: started clearing those forests for farmlands, they thrived in the
Speaker 1: disturbed soil. The plants themselves could choke out crops and
Speaker 1: make them difficult to harvest, and the burrs could ruin
Speaker 1: sheep's wool and cause problems for other livestock. Cocklebar seeds
Speaker 1: contain a glucoside that's toxic to mammals, but Carolina parakeets
Speaker 1: love to grab one with a claw, eat the seeds
Speaker 1: out of the middle of it, and then drop the
Speaker 1: prickly part on the ground. Carolina parakeets love of these
Speaker 1: seeds made them useful for cocklebar control and for control
Speaker 1: of the similarly annoying sand spur, which they also liked
Speaker 1: to eat. But European Colonists also were planting orchards of
Speaker 1: fruit trees, and the parakeets treated these crops exactly the
Speaker 1: same way that they treated cocklebers. They grabbed the fruit
Speaker 1: with a foot, pecked the seeds out of it, and
Speaker 1: then threw the ruined fruit down on the ground. That
Speaker 1: is their bad character, litterbugs. They're wasteful. I somehow feel
Speaker 1: guilty also joking about it. Extinct species. I'm gonna put
Speaker 1: this away now. Carolina parakeets went after cultivated fields of
Speaker 1: corn and other grains as well, spoiling more food than
Speaker 1: they ate. John James Audubon described them as covering fields
Speaker 1: of stacked grains so completely that they looked like a
Speaker 1: bright carpet on top of all this crop destruction. Carolina
Speaker 1: parakeets were highly social, gregarious birds that traveled in huge,
Speaker 1: noisy flocks and left lots of droppings behind, so a
Speaker 1: lot of colonists thought they were an enormous nuisance. Farmers
Speaker 1: hunted them aggressively to keep them away from crops, and
Speaker 1: people also hunted them for food and for their feathers.
Speaker 1: That very vibrant, beautiful plumage made them really popular among milliners.
Speaker 1: The bird's own behavior also made them easy targets. They
Speaker 1: congregated in large flocks, and they would fly off at
Speaker 1: the sound of gunfire, but then all the birds would
Speaker 1: return to the same spot, especially if they heard one
Speaker 1: of their own injured. There By the early nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: the Carolina parakeet's numbers were in obvious decline. John J.
Speaker 1: Audubon published his Birds of America in installments from eighteen
Speaker 1: twenty seven to eighteen thirty eight, and in that book
Speaker 1: he described the decline as recent. He said that they
Speaker 1: had been plentiful twenty five years before. In this drop
Speaker 1: in population can't really be pinned on just one cause.
Speaker 1: In addition to the relentless hunting, the birds lost huge
Speaker 1: amounts of habitats through deforestation, especially after the Cotton gin
Speaker 1: made cotton a profitable crop in the South. It's also
Speaker 1: possible that the birds were forced out of nesting sites
Speaker 1: after the introduction of bees to North America. There was
Speaker 1: never a formal study of these birds in the wild,
Speaker 1: so there is a bit of debate about whether they
Speaker 1: nested in hollow trees like honey bees do, or if
Speaker 1: they built nests out of sticks, or if they possibly
Speaker 1: did some of both. In the last few decades of
Speaker 1: their existence, Carolina parakeets were viewed as much less of
Speaker 1: a nuisance. Their numbers had dropped to the point that
Speaker 1: their control of cocklebers outweighed their potential damage to crops.
Speaker 1: Farmers were more inclined to just let them be, which
Speaker 1: may have ultimately led to their extinction. We really don't
Speaker 1: know what tipped the scale from a reduced population to
Speaker 1: one that was actively dying out, but one theory is
Speaker 1: that Carolina parakeets contracted a viral disease from domesticated poultry,
Speaker 1: and that only would have been possible after they were
Speaker 1: allowed to hang around farms instead of being shot on site.
Speaker 1: In nineteen oh four, the last known wild Carolina parakeet
Speaker 1: was killed in Okachobee County, Florida. Carolina parakeets were easy
Speaker 1: to keep his pets, although they could not be trained
Speaker 1: to talk. Breeding pairs and small groups also lived in
Speaker 1: zoos on both sides of the Atlantic until the early
Speaker 1: twentieth century, and they had been bred in captivity since
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy seven. There wasn't any sort of organized breeding
Speaker 1: program to try to repopulate the species or create a
Speaker 1: genetically diverse breeding pool at the Cincinnati Zoo. Incas and
Speaker 1: Lady Jane produced several eggs, but they tended to throw
Speaker 1: them out of the nest and they weren't retrieved or incubated.
Speaker 1: After Incas's death on February twenty first, nineteen eighteen, it
Speaker 1: took a while to confirm that the species really was extinct.
Speaker 1: The official determination came in nineteen thirty nine, following a
Speaker 1: National Audubon Society search of South Carolina after a purported
Speaker 1: siding there. None of these reported sidings were ever substantiated,
Speaker 1: and a few of them turned out to be feral
Speaker 1: parrots or parakeets that had previously been somebody's pets and
Speaker 1: had wound up out in the wild. I grew up
Speaker 1: in North Carolin, and I always as a child having
Speaker 1: heard about the Carolina parakeet, the fact that I was
Speaker 1: from North Carolina and that they were from North Carolina,
Speaker 1: and when the name Carolina parakeet meant that they were
Speaker 1: my personal species of parakeet that was now extinct, and
Speaker 1: I was very put out about that. And when Incas died,
Speaker 1: it was purportedly in the same cage where Martha, the
Speaker 1: last passenger pigeon, had also died, and we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about Martha and passenger pigeons in general after we
Speaker 1: first paused for a little sponsor break. Passenger pigeons or
Speaker 1: Ectoscopies migratoris used to be the most common bird in
Speaker 1: what's now the United States. Their winter range stretched from
Speaker 1: eastern Canada down to Florida. It went all across the
Speaker 1: Mississippi River, covering more than half of the continent. Their
Speaker 1: breeding range was a smaller hocket, primarily around the Great
Speaker 1: Lakes and what's now New York. Male passenger pigeons were
Speaker 1: blue gray with a rosy pink throat and chest. They
Speaker 1: were about sixteen and a half inches that's about forty
Speaker 1: two centimeters in length, and females were slightly smaller and
Speaker 1: not as distinctively colored. They were closer to brown gray
Speaker 1: than blue gray, and they had more subdued coloring on
Speaker 1: their throat and chest. They looked enough like mourning doves
Speaker 1: that this often led to cases of mistaken identity, although
Speaker 1: passenger pigeons were usually a couple of inches larger than
Speaker 1: mourning doves. They ate nuts, acorns, seeds, and berries, along
Speaker 1: with some worms and insects. In the spring, and summer.
Speaker 1: So when we say the most common bird, it's estimated
Speaker 1: that before European arrival in North America, there were between
Speaker 1: three and five billion of them, that is, billion with
Speaker 1: a bee, making up between twenty five and forty percent
Speaker 1: of all the birds. In the places where they lived.
Speaker 1: They formed a noise ormous colonies, with up to one
Speaker 1: hundred nests in an individual tree. Sometimes so many birds
Speaker 1: would nest in a tree that branches would snap off
Speaker 1: of it or the tree itself would fall. In the
Speaker 1: seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, missionary Gabriel Sagarteadat described their numbers
Speaker 1: as infinite multitudes, and Cotton Mather wrote about mile wide
Speaker 1: flocks that took hours to pass overhead. Here's how John J.
Speaker 1: Audubon described a flock he saw in eighteen thirteen quote,
Speaker 1: the air was literally filled with pigeons. The light of
Speaker 1: noonday was obscured as by an eclipse. The dung fell
Speaker 1: in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow, and the
Speaker 1: continued buzz of the wings had a tendency to lull
Speaker 1: my senses to repose. An eighteen fifty five account from Columbus,
Speaker 1: Ohio described the local response to the passing of an
Speaker 1: enormous pigeon flock quote, children screamed and ran for a home,
Speaker 1: Women gathered their long skirts and hurried for the shelter
Speaker 1: of stores. Horses bolted, a few people mumbled frightened words
Speaker 1: about the approach of the millennium, and several dropped onto
Speaker 1: their knees and prayed. According to this account, this flock's
Speaker 1: passage took two hours. There have been a number of
Speaker 1: remarks about, like, we don't have any kind of pictures
Speaker 1: or I mean obviously not video quite at that point
Speaker 1: showing how dramatic these flocks of birds were. But like
Speaker 1: the over and over, they're described as literally blotting out
Speaker 1: the sun and just waiting for hours and hours as
Speaker 1: this massive flock of birds that blotted out the sun
Speaker 1: flew over and left droppings everywhere. Yeah, I think the
Speaker 1: fact that people responded as though the apocalypse was nine
Speaker 1: is a pretty good indicator of how significant this bird
Speaker 1: flight was. Uh. This eighteen fifty five account is somewhat
Speaker 1: surprising because the passenger pigeon had a pretty similar trajectory
Speaker 1: to the Carolina parakeet, and by eighteen fifty five their
Speaker 1: numbers were noticeably declining. This decline came primarily from over hunting.
Speaker 1: Passenger pigeons formed such enormous flocks that they vastly outnumbered
Speaker 1: animal predators, so normal predation and even some hunting by
Speaker 1: humans wasn't enough to really reduce their numbers. But the
Speaker 1: passenger pigeon could not overcome industrialization and are rapidly increasing
Speaker 1: human population in the nineteenth century. To technologies were a
Speaker 1: huge part of the end of the species, the telegraph
Speaker 1: and the railroad. The telegraph made it easy to send
Speaker 1: word of where passenger pigeons were roosting, and the railroad
Speaker 1: made it possible to ship huge barrels of pigeons around
Speaker 1: the country to use as a cheap source of meat.
Speaker 1: There were no conservation laws restricting how people hunted passenger
Speaker 1: pigeons or how many could be killed, so people hunted
Speaker 1: them at their nesting sites, and they killed massively unsustainable
Speaker 1: numbers in one go. One eighteen seventy eight hunt in
Speaker 1: Michigan took fifty thousand birds a day from their nesting site.
Speaker 1: As we said earlier, people had been noticing that the
Speaker 1: pigeon population was dropping as early as the eighteen fifties.
Speaker 1: People were still hunting these pigeons in massive numbers decades
Speaker 1: after they noticed their decline. States began passing laws to
Speaker 1: try to protect the passenger pigeon, including outlawing hunting near
Speaker 1: their nesting areas and in one case, closing the pigeon
Speaker 1: hunting season entirely. In nineteen hundred, President William McKinley signed
Speaker 1: the Lacey Act, which was the nation's first federal conservation
Speaker 1: law meant to protect fish and wildlife. One of the
Speaker 1: motivations for passing the Lacy Act was the plummeting stock
Speaker 1: of passenger pigeons, and it made it illegal to poach
Speaker 1: pigeons from one state with the intent of selling them
Speaker 1: in another. This was far too late for the passenger pigeon,
Speaker 1: though by this point some states where the birds had
Speaker 1: been widespread hadn't spotted one in years. The last confirmed
Speaker 1: sighting of a wild passenger pigeon was on March twenty fourth,
Speaker 1: nineteen hundred, in Pike County, Ohio, almost two months to
Speaker 1: the day before the passage of the Lacy Act. Ornithologists
Speaker 1: mounted organized searches, including offering up a reward of fifteen
Speaker 1: hundred dollars to anyone who could find a passenger pigeon
Speaker 1: between nineteen oh nine and nineteen twelve, but none were found.
Speaker 1: By the nineteen teens, the birds were extinct in the wild,
Speaker 1: and the only captive populations were in three zoos, the
Speaker 1: Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, the Milwaukee Zoo, and the Cincinnati Zoo.
Speaker 1: Attempts to set up a breeding program failed because the
Speaker 1: bird's highly social nature meant that they just didn't breed
Speaker 1: well in captivity. Martha, the last of the passenger pigeons,
Speaker 1: was born in the Brookfield Zoo and then donated to Cincinnati.
Speaker 1: She was named after Martha Washington and her later years,
Speaker 1: her keepers had to keep lowering her perch as she
Speaker 1: became less able to fly, so they basically had to
Speaker 1: get it low enough that she could just climb up there.
Speaker 1: The last male passenger pigeon died at the zoo on
Speaker 1: July tenth, nineteen ten, and then Martha died on September one,
Speaker 1: nineteen fourteen, at the age of about twenty nine. After
Speaker 1: her death, Martha was packed in a three hundred pound
Speaker 1: block of ice and shipped to the Smithsonian by train.
Speaker 1: Taxidermist Nelson Wood mounted her remains and her internal organs
Speaker 1: are part of the Smithsonian's wet collections. Martha is still
Speaker 1: part of the Smithsonian collection as well, although she is
Speaker 1: not usually on display because she is so delicate and
Speaker 1: very valuable. There's also a passenger pigeon memorial at the
Speaker 1: Cincinnati Zoo. Our last endling was also preserved through taxidermy.
Speaker 1: Couldn't confirm whether Incas was or not, and we will
Speaker 1: get to that last story after one more quick sponsor break.
Speaker 1: The Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador are famous
Speaker 1: for their diversity of plant and animal life, with a
Speaker 1: lot of species that are unique to each individual island.
Speaker 1: Charles Darwin conducted research there during the second voyage aboard
Speaker 1: the HMS Beagle, which contributed to his theory of evolution
Speaker 1: by means of natural selection. Giant tortoises are one of
Speaker 1: the most famous animals found in the Galapagos. Galapago in
Speaker 1: Spanish means turtle, and there are fifteen different species which
Speaker 1: fall into two primary categories, domed and saddlebacked. Pinta Island
Speaker 1: tortoises were saddlebacked tortoises with the shape of their shell
Speaker 1: allowing them to stretch their heads up to reach for food.
Speaker 1: This was also a form of communication among the tortoises.
Speaker 1: They would stretch their heads up as far as possible
Speaker 1: when settling disputes. These tortoises were, as their name suggests,
Speaker 1: found on Pinta Island. Penta Island as a shield volcano,
Speaker 1: and it's the northernmost island of the Galapagos, so for
Speaker 1: whalers who passed through the area, Penta Island was usually
Speaker 1: the first and last island they passed on their journey.
Speaker 1: From the seventeen hundreds to the nineteen hundreds, whalers hunted
Speaker 1: a lot of tortoises from Pinta Island to use as food,
Speaker 1: and as was the case with the Carolina parakeet, the
Speaker 1: tortoises own traits made them susceptible to this. Tortoises can
Speaker 1: live for an extended period without food or water. Whalers
Speaker 1: realized that this meant that they could capture live tortoises
Speaker 1: on the island and keep them alive on board their
Speaker 1: ships without a lot of effort, allowing them to have
Speaker 1: fresh tortoise meat in transit. It's hard to pinpoint how
Speaker 1: many tortoises were taken from Pinta Island, alone, but it's
Speaker 1: estimated that more than one hundred thousand tortoises were killed
Speaker 1: in the Galapagos in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By
Speaker 1: the early twentieth century, researchers believed that the Penta Island
Speaker 1: tortoise was already extinct. At that time, the island's ecosystem
Speaker 1: was in pretty good condition apart from the absence of tortoises.
Speaker 1: But in nineteen fifty nine, some fishermen released three goats
Speaker 1: onto the island, hoping to use them as a food supply.
Speaker 1: When they passed through the area, as will surprise no
Speaker 1: one who has ever been around goats, they ran rampant
Speaker 1: over the island. They ate their way through a lot
Speaker 1: of the vegetation, and they produced lots and lots more goats.
Speaker 1: At that point, researchers concluded that if there had somehow
Speaker 1: been any tortoises left on Pensa Island, the feral goats
Speaker 1: would have destroyed their habitat completely. And yet, in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy one, a Hungarian scientist who was on the island
Speaker 1: studying snails spotted a tortoise. The scientist's name and apologies
Speaker 1: if this is a butchering job was Yojev Vagvolji, and
Speaker 1: when he got back to Port, he reported what he
Speaker 1: had seen, and a year later Galapagos National Park rangers
Speaker 1: went to the island to look for themselves, and there
Speaker 1: they found one tortoise, and they took him to the
Speaker 1: Tortoise Center on Santa Cruz to keep him safe. The
Speaker 1: American media later started calling him Lonesome George, after TV
Speaker 1: comedian George Goebel, who had given himself that same nickname
Speaker 1: for decades. They tried to find a breeding partner for
Speaker 1: Lonesome George. They tried pairing him with other tortoise species,
Speaker 1: including two female wolf Volcano giant tortoises from Isabella Island. Later,
Speaker 1: DNA research revealed that Pensa Island tortoises might be more
Speaker 1: compatible with the Espanola tortoise. Two female Espanola tortoises from
Speaker 1: a breeding program were housed in George's corral, but none
Speaker 1: of the eggs that they produced were fertile. Lonesome George
Speaker 1: died on June twenty fourth, twenty twelve, and he was
Speaker 1: probably at least one hundred and that sounds like quite old,
Speaker 1: but he was actually on the younger side for a
Speaker 1: Pina Island tortoise. Those tortoises could live to be up
Speaker 1: to two hundred, but the average age was more like
Speaker 1: around one hundred and fifty and other than some weight
Speaker 1: gain which is common among tortoises in captivity. He had
Speaker 1: been in good health and his death was really unexpected.
Speaker 1: His unexpected death meant that his keepers were unprepared for
Speaker 1: preserving his body. The islands are remote and the temperature
Speaker 1: was around one hundred degrees fahrenheit or thirty eight celsius.
Speaker 1: They eventually secured enough plastic wrap to cover his entire
Speaker 1: body and a freezer to store him in lonesome George's
Speaker 1: remains were transported to the United States, where New Jersey
Speaker 1: taxidermists George Dante preserved them in a year long, thirty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars process that took five hundred hours of labor
Speaker 1: to complete. George spent some time on display at the
Speaker 1: American Museum of Natural History before being returned to Ecuador.
Speaker 1: There was a little bit of a dispute between the
Speaker 1: researchers and the Galopagos and the government of Ecuador about
Speaker 1: where he should be kept. Once he was returned. The
Speaker 1: government's argument was that a lot more people would be
Speaker 1: able to see him on display in the capital of Quito,
Speaker 1: and they also argued that there wasn't a facility in
Speaker 1: the Galopogos Islands that could guarantee precise enough temperature and
Speaker 1: humidity control. I mean, after an animal specimen is preserved
Speaker 1: through taxidermy like, that doesn't mean it stops decaying for
Speaker 1: the rest of time. Right, It's still tissue that's going
Speaker 1: to have to be preserved. So there is a bronze
Speaker 1: statue of George at Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz and the
Speaker 1: Galapagos instead. In nineteen ninety seven, the Charles Darwin Foundation
Speaker 1: and the Galapagos National Park Service launched Project Isabella, which
Speaker 1: was a massive conservation project meant to restore several islands
Speaker 1: that had been damaged through the introduction of non native
Speaker 1: plants and animals, and this included exterminating hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of feral goats. The work at Penta Islands started in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety nine, and in two thousand and three the
Speaker 1: island was declared goat free. Fortunately, it appears that none
Speaker 1: of the island's plant species became extinct during the goat infestation,
Speaker 1: and May of twenty ten, thirty nine sterilized adult tortoises
Speaker 1: were released on the island to continue the restoration process.
Speaker 1: So basically, they're there to serve the purpose that tortoises
Speaker 1: fulfill in that ecology, but not to make more baby
Speaker 1: tortoises yet. I'm going to work on that part later
Speaker 1: in twenty fifteen, a breeding program was announced to try
Speaker 1: to bring back the Pinta Island tortoise, or at least
Speaker 1: a tortoise that is ninety five percent genetically similar. The
Speaker 1: starting point is a population of Isabella Island tortoises that
Speaker 1: had interbred with some Pinta Island tortoises that sailors throw
Speaker 1: overboard about one hundred years ago. There has also been
Speaker 1: talk of cloning Lonesome George himself, although that has of
Speaker 1: course raised a number of ethical questions, along with concerns
Speaker 1: that people won't care about protecting and daured animal species
Speaker 1: if we just clone them later. We said at the
Speaker 1: top of the show, or the top of this chapter
Speaker 1: of the show, that there were fifteen species of tortoise
Speaker 1: in the Galopogos, but now there are only ten. Some
Speaker 1: of those species were only saved from extinction through very
Speaker 1: careful breeding programs and other conservation efforts, and although they
Speaker 1: used to live elsewhere in the world, giant tortoises are
Speaker 1: now found only in the Galopogos and in the Aldabra
Speaker 1: atole in the Seychelles. Thanks so much for joining us
Speaker 1: on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
Speaker 1: if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL
Speaker 1: or something similar over the course of the show, that
Speaker 1: could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History
Speaker 1: Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all
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