Meet the tortoises


1. Carolina  ||   2. Sebastian  ||   3. Karla  ||   4. Wilman  ||   5. Lolo  ||   6. Delmira  ||   7. Maria  ||   8. Helber

9. Wacho  ||   10. Patty  ||   11. Jumbo  ||   12. Nigrita  ||   13. Freddy  ||   14. Sandra

Carolina
Tag ID number 774
Sex Female
Date tagged 14 May 2009
Tagging location Latitude -0.658739
Tagging location Longitude -90.245003
GNP ID number 178
Estimated age 100 years
Meet Carolina on Facebook!

See Carolina's movements on Movebank.org

Carolina lives her life among the 'La Reserva' tortoise population. She is a beautiful example of this race of tortoises, the scientific name of which is Geochelone nigra porteri. The sub-species name 'porteri' comes from Captain Porter, an American naval officer who sailed Galapagos waters in the early 1800s. While we do not know quite how old any Galapagos tortoises are, it is quite possible that Carolina’s mother was roaming around Santa Cruz when Captain Porter was fighting the British in the eastern Pacific and coming to Galapagos to stock up on tortoise meat! Fortunately for Carolina, Galapagos tortoises on Santa Cruz have enjoyed relative peace during most of her lifetime, and Carolina leads a tranquil existence.

Carolina was fitted with her GPS tag on the day she had been mating with Sebastian (see Sebastian's entry in meet the tortoises). Soon after this, she decided to move into the highlands of Galapagos, into the Mariposa Ranch, which belongs to a great friend of the Galapagos Tortoise Programme called Steve Devine. Rather than take a random route through the farm, Carolina followed a fence line with an overstory of large trees. Under the trees, the vegetation is open, without the dense herb/shrub layer of vegetation which makes movements difficult, even for giant tortoises.



Carolina's movement fly in the face of the traditional wisdom of tortoise seasonal migrations since she travelled uphill into cool air during the nesting season. While she moved up the island, most of her female peers moved into the tortoise nesting areas of the Santa Cruz lowlands. As cold blooded animals, tortoises find it hard to keep their body temperature up during the cold wet season in Galapagos, and because of their large bodies it is easier for males to cope with the cold than females. However whenever we saw Carolina at the Mariposa Farm, she seemed to be fine.



        



Sebastian
Tag ID number 775
Sex Male
Date tagged 14 May 2009
Tagging location Latitude -0.658739
Tagging location Longitude -90.245003
GNP ID number 101
Estimated age 130 years
Meet Sebastian on Facebook!

See Sebastian's movements on Movebank.org

Sebastian is, after Lolo, the biggest Galapagos tortoise we have tagged. We estimate that he weights between 250-300kg, particularly after feasting on a variety of tasty fruits that occur in his home range during the wet season.

When we tagged him, Sebastian was 'courting' a female tortoise in an area called 'la Caseta' in Galapagos National Park. They had been mating in the early morning before we found them, and we thought the two of them would make ideal tortoises for our research since we could obtain information on whether they remained together or separated after their romance. We sadly report that they went their separate ways! Sebastian soon went down to the lowlands of Santa Cruz into the tortoise nesting areas where he undoubtedly found many other females, while Carolina moved into the highlands and into the beautiful Mariposa Ranch, where incidentally some of the largest male tortoises on Galapagos can be found. It seems therefore that Sebastian and Carolina met like ships in the night. Our data over the coming years will tell us whether they every meet again.

Sebastian gets his name from a close collaborator of the Galapagos Tortoise Program, a scientist called Sebastian Cruz, who was born and grew up on Galapagos. Sebastian normally works on swallow tailed gull movements but found the time to help us tag Sebastian the tortoise.



        



Karla
Tag ID number 767
Sex Female
Date tagged 29 April 2009
Tagging location Latitude -0.648880
Tagging location Longitude -90.269095
GNP ID number 903
Estimated age 30-40 years
Meet Karla on Facebook!

See Karla's movements on Movebank.org

Karla is a young female tortoise from the Cerro Fatal population found to the east of Santa Cruz. She was tagged at a seasonally flooded lagoon near to Cerro Mesa. The lagoon is important for the tortoise population as water provides a good means of temperature regulation for tortoises, and also because the lagoon promotes good growth of vegetation. The most remarkable thing about Karla on the day we tagged her was her weight. She had clearly been feeding on guayava and passion fruits (both are invasive species) for the previous several weeks because she had laid down a very impressive fat reserve. We put the tag on with little fuss from her, and left her with strong sense of curiosity as to where she would go in the coming months. Well, like Maria, after several months of data, Karla still has a tiny home range of just a few hectares. She certainly did not migrate into the arid lowlands to lay eggs. We had thought that she would at least move downhill into warmer air to avoid the cold, wet nights of the cool season between June and December, but she seemed to cope where she was.

Karla selects several vegetation types in what is a fairly varied habitat, using the lagoon, open vegetation dominated by herbs, through shrub thickets, and into guayava-dominated forest. So far, she has retained her fat layer, so she can get what she needs from her small range. We are interested to see what she goes and what she does through a full annual seasonal cycle.


        



Wilman
Tag ID number 769
Sex Male
Date tagged 30 April 2009
Tagging location Latitude -0.658739
Tagging location Longitude -90.245003
GNP ID number No number
Estimated age 30-40 years
Meet Wilman on Facebook!

See Wilman's movements on Movebank.org

Wilman is the second male from the Cerro Fatal population of giant tortoises to be GPS tagged. He is named after a Galapagos National Park guard who was involved in the tagging operation. As a young adult, Wilman was not an ideal choice for our study, since we were most interested in the movements of mature adults, however adult males are so rare in the Cerro Fatal population that we decided to work with him despite his youth.

Wilman was tagged in relatively arid land at about 160 metres above sea level close to Maria's tagging site. The vegetation there is dominated by cactus (Opuntia echios), a favoured tortoise food, and the Incense tree (Bursera graveolens) both of which are native species to Galapagos. He has proven to be more active than Maria, having travelled nearly a kilometre from the tagging site, though he has shown no evidence of a true migration. More likely his wanderings are simply the result of a non-directional search for food rather than targeted movements due to specific environmental cues.

We have few interesting photographs of Wilman since he seems to have his head buried in thick vegetation whenever we see him. However he did have the honour of a visit from Dr. Peter Pritchard, the world renowned Herpetologist, who probably knows more about tortoises than the tortoises themselves. Fortunately on that occasion we saw all of him, and Dr. Pritchard had the greater honour!

Wilman is definitely mature enough to reproduce, so we are intrigued to see where he travels to next year during the breeding season.


        



Lolo
Tag ID number 771
Sex Male
Date tagged 4 May 2009
Tagging location Latitude -0.658739
Tagging location Longitude -90.245003
GNP ID number 205
Estimated age 150
Meet Lolo on Facebook!

See Lolo's movements on Movebank.org

Even for a giant Galapagos tortoise Lolo is...giant! On the day he was fitted with his GPS tag, we found him walking along an open trail in La Reserva region of the Galapagos National Park. The trail was the only way through an otherwise huge and impenetrable tangle of a prickley liana called Caesalpinia bunduc. Even the Galapagos National Park ranger involved in the tagging was startled by Lolo's size. That rangers name was...Lolo, a big, quiet, calm man liked by everyone, and we thought it fitting to name the tortoise in his honour.

Lolo (the tortoise) was completely calm throughout the tagging procedure - he put his head in his shell at the beginning and didn't bring it out until we had packed up and ready to go. In the first few weeks after tagging, Lolo remained in a small area of the national park, after which he moved up into farmland, most likely to enjoy the new growth of nutritious grass that the rainy Garua season brings to the highlands roughly between June and December. Unlike Sebastian and Helber, Lolo's movements have not yet shown a true migration pattern, and he seems to prefer moving on a small scale between farmland and the park.



        



Delmira
Tag ID number 770
Sex Female
Date tagged 4 May 2009
Tagging location Latitude -0.67559
Tagging location Longitude -90.420184
GNP ID number 1757
Estimated age 90
Meet Delmira on Facebook!

See Delmira's movements on Movebank.org

Delmira is named after the wife of Lolo the Galapagos National Park ranger who helped tag her, and who is also the namesake of Lolo the tortoise. She was walking purposefully down the perimeter road of the National Park on the day we found her. Indeed she was not happy about being stopped and tagged, and unlike the other GPS tagged tortoises, she did not retreat into her shell when we started preparing her shell, but rather made several attempts to walk away. Trying to stop a determined female Galapagos tortoise was not easy for the tagging team. In the end, she decided to close up into her shell and wait out the procedure - had she not done so, we would have been unable to fit her GPS tag. Immediately we had finished, she was off, walking determinedly in the same direction as before.

The following week we found Delmira about 200 metres from the tagging site with a huge male tortoise. Clearly they had been mating. Fortunately, the tag showed no signs of damage, despite the fact that it had been repeatedly hit by the powerful fore feet of the male tortoise. Unlike males, whose tags are attached to the rear end of the carapace, we put the tags on the front end of the shell of female tortoises, just behind the head, specifically so that they do not inhibit mating. The tags do not appear to concern the tortoises in any way.

Delmira has been a difficult tortoise to track, and we have not had any data from her since the end of May. We know she is out there and that her tag is working because we occasionally get a faint signal from her. We plan to make a concerted effort to find her and download her valuable movement data.

Maria
Tag ID number 765
Sex Female
Date tagged 27 April 2009
Tagging location Latitude -0.658482
Tagging location Longitude -90.246017
GNP ID number 949
Estimated age 30 years

Meet Maria on Facebook!

See Maria's movements on Movebank.org

Maria is a member of the Cerro Fatal tortoise population. The Cerro Fatal population is so called because the heart of their range is a small hill in the Santa Cruz lowlands of the same name. These tortoises were hunted for food until about 30 years ago and the population size today remains small. Maria is one of a handful of adult females and therefore she bears a considerable responsibility for the regeneration of the population.

Maria is named in honour of the wife of Sr. Wilman, a Galapagos National Park ranger who helped find and tag this tortoise. She was marked by park rangers some years ago with a unique identification number (949) so that her life history could be followed.

Maria was tagged in the relatively arid Santa Cruz lowlands. The vegetation in the zone is dominated by cactus, a favoured tortoise food, which might explain why Maria has maintained a tiny home range since she was tagged back in April 2009, and since that date, has hardly moved! We had assumed that she would migrate to one of the well known tortoise nesting areas during the nesting season between July and November, but she has remained surprisingly sedentary. She has a home range of just 10.4 hectares, and has not moved more than 250m from where she was tagged. Currently a home body, it will be interesting to see where she goes over the coming two years.

        



Helber
Tag ID number 766
Sex Male
Date tagged 29 April 2009
Tagging location Latitude -0.645446
Tagging location Longitude -90.281283
GNP ID number 1688
Estimated age 80 years
Meet Helber on Facebook!

See Helber's movements on Movebank.org

Like Maria, Helber is part of the Cerro Fatal tortoise population. We found Helber feeding heavily on guayava (Psidium guayava) fruits on a farm near Cerro Mesa, a large hill to the east of Santa Cruz. There were literally hundreds of fruits within a 10m radius of Helber, and he was obviously enjoying the feast. We was an easy subject to tag, and as soon as we started working on him, he put his head in his shell, hissed loudly, put his feet in, and obviously decided to sit out whatever we had planned for him. The tagging process was uneventful, and after we had finished, Helber simply resumed his feeding bout with obvious pleasure.

Helber has proved to be a true migration specialist! In May 2009, he left Cerro Mesa and headed almost directly down the southeastern flank of Santa Cruz to Cerro Fatal. During his migration, his daily travel distance averaged about 280 metres, compared to just 58 metres per day before and after the migration. One of the most obvious reasons for his migration is that the base of Cerro Mesa is a large tortoise breeding and nesting area. Clearly Helber was in need of some female company. He is one of only a handful of large breeding males in the Cerro Fatal population, and he is an important player in the future of these tortoises. Fortunately, he seems to be a hit with the girls.

We expect Helber to make the climb back to Cerro Mesa sometime near the end of 2009. Keep checking on this web site, become a friend of Helber on Facebook, or check out his latest movements on Movebank.


        





Wacho
Tag ID number 1022
Sex Male
Date tagged 11 December 2009
Tagging location Latitude -0.68674
Tagging location Longitude -90.37209
GNP ID number No ID number
Estimated age 80 years
Wacho is named after the Assistant Director of the Galapagos National Park, Sr. Washington Tapia (known locally as Wacho). He as tagged in the grounds of small tourist lodge called Semilla Verde (The Green Seed) in the highlands of Santa Cruz. We had tagged a female in the same area a couple of days before, who we called Patty, after Patricia Jaramillo, Coordinator of the Herbarium of the Charles Darwin Research Station, and wife of Wacho (the human version).

Wacho was tagged with the help of the 12th grade class of the Tomas de Berlanga School on Santa Cruz.

According to the Rob Grimstone, the owner of Semilla Verde, Wacho had arrived on the property sometime in October 2009, and had hardly moved for over a month. Rob has restored his land from abandoned scrub highly contaminated with invasive species into a verdant forest of native Scalesia trees with an understory heavy with native herbs and grasses. Wacho and other giant tortoises actually prefer some of the invasive grass species to the native ones since they are often nutritionally richer and easier to digest, but Wacho also seems to enjoy the native vegetation of Semilla Verde.

Currently, we do not have a map of Wacho’s movements because a month or so after he was fitted with his GPS tag, Wacho disappeared. We occasionally get a signal on the radio tracking beacon, but we not found him so far. He is somewhere down in the lowlands of Santa Cruz, several miles from Semilla Verde, in flat, rugged habitat with many deep valleys, which once inside, mean that his radio beacon can no longer be picked up with our tracking equipment. We may not find Wacho until he returns to Rob’s Farmat the end of his next seasonal migration, at which point we can download his GPS data and discover where he went!



        



Patty
Tag ID number 1021
Sex Female
Date tagged 9 December 2009
Tagging location Latitude -0.68674
Tagging location Longitude -90.37209
GNP ID number No ID number
Estimated age 70 years
Like her friend Wacho, Patty was tagged in collaboration with students from the Tomas de Berlanga School. On the 9 December 2009, we organized 3 taxis to take a group of 8th grade students to the “Semilla Verde” property in the Santa Cruz highlands. A walk around the area showed that Patty was the only female Galapagos tortoise in the area, and though she was a little smaller than we hoped to find, we decided that, since she was obviously a mature female with no obvious health problems, she would be appropriate for GPS tagging.

As soon as we approached her, Patty decided she did not want to participate in our research project and started moving away. Giant tortoises are incredibly strong, and Patty was hard to restrain, though settled down during tag attachment. Later, she moved into a thicket of elephant grass, and that was the last we saw of her. Like Wacho, Patty soon left Semilla Verde and headed down into the flat lowlands of Santa Cruz near to the coast. We have not been able to locate her to download the GPS data so the secrets of her migration remain locked in her GPS tag and her own head.

Patty is named after Patricia Jaramillo, a botanist who has worked at the Charles Darwin Research Station for 12 years.

The human Patty is involved in several aspects of the Galapagos Tortoise Programme including overseeing our germination study in which we are assessing the impact of tortoise dispersal on the germination success of seeds. Her botanical skills mean that Patty is an excellent identifier of seed species we find in tortoise dung. Patty the tortoise will help us understand not just tortoise migration ecology, but also the distances over which Galapagos tortoises transport the seeds they eat, thus both Patty the tortoise and Patty the human are working together to unravel the complexity of Galapagos tortoise ecology.



        



Jumbo
Tag ID number 1191
Sex Male
Date tagged 24 March 2010
Tagging location Latitude -0.648596
Tagging location Longitude -90.244973
GNP ID number No ID number
Estimated age 80 years
Far from the Galapagos Islands, the Zurich Zoo is home to perhaps the most famous Giant tortoises in captivity (with the exception of Lonesome George of course). A pair of tortoises, named Jumbo and Nigrita, have been living happily in the zoo for several decades. Unlike many zoos, Zurich’s dedicated keepers have provided the right combination of conditions that promote good health which in turn means that Jumbo and Nigrita have produced a prodigious number of offspring. The Zurich Zoo is a great friend of the Galapagos Tortoise Project and together with the Swiss Friends of Galapagos (FOGO) fund our work, and work with us on outreach and education.

When we out in the Cerro Fatal area of Santa Cruz looking for suitable tortoises on which to put GPS tags, we found a huge male sitting on a flat slab of lava surrounded by Opuntia cactus. He was very large indeed for a “Cerro Fatal” tortoise, and looked fat, happy and fit. We knew we had found our wild “Jumbo”. Under the supervision of Freddy Cabrera, we quickly fitted a GPS tag to our new Jumbo, and programmed it to collect one GPS fix every hour, along with “accelerometer” data every 5 minutes which records activity levels over the coming years.

Jumbo was rather sedentary for the first 8 weeks or so after tag attachment. However with the change if season from wet season to dry cold Garua (misty) season, he began to migrate uphill toward Cerro Mesa.



        



Nigrita
Tag ID number 1190
Sex Female
Date tagged 24 February 2010
Tagging location Latitude -0.634504
Tagging location Longitude -90.241575
GNP ID number 912
Estimated age 100 years
Nigrita was tagged in the shadow of the Cerro Fatal in February 2010. Cerro Fatal is in the arid lowlands of Santa Cruz, and usually there is very little vegetation and therefore limited amounts of food for tortoises. This year however, rainfall on Galapagos has been exceptionally high which led to a bumper year of plant growth in the lowlands. Cerro Fatal was looking green and verdant compared to its usual brown and barren self.

Nigrita would probably not have been at Cerro Fatal in this season at all, but she was probably attracted to the area by all the good food!

So far, Nigrita has been rather sedentary, and has not moved more than a couple of hundred metres from the tagging site. Most likely she will remain in Cerro Fatal now for the duration of the nesting season which is from about June-November.

Whether Nigrita will ever meet her counterpart Jumbo remains to be seen. It would be good indeed if we could report a romance between the two back to their captive counterparts in the Zurich Zoo. Her strategy looks to be one of “wait and he will appear”, so perhaps we need to wait do the same and hope Jumbo finds his way to Cerro Fatal.



        



Freddy
Tag ID number 1274
Sex Male
Date tagged 8 June 2010
Tagging location Latitude -0.637063
Tagging location Longitude -90.24245
GNP ID number 911
Estimated age 90 years
Freddy is the second largest male to be tagged in the Cerro Fatal population. These tortoises are usually smaller than their “Reserva” counterparts on the other side of Santa Cruz. The biggest male we have measured at Cerro Fatal was 129.6cm along the length of the carapace (the appropriately named Jumbo), while males in la Reserva frequently attain over 160cm in length. No one is quite sure why this is, though possible reasons include the distinct genetic heritage of each tortoise population, the history of hunting tortoises for food in Cerro Fatal, or the fact that the rainfall is higher in La Reserva, and therefore there is usually much more food available for tortoises to eat compared to those in Cerro Fatal.

Freddy was found in the cactus dominated lowlands close to Cerro Fatal itself. He is a tortoise known to the Galapagos National Park Service, and bears the identification number 911. He appeared to be in excellent condition though had some rather odd patches of while material to the rear end of his carapace. Tortoises sometimes develop these patches after long periods in water, so possibly he had been bathing in one of the numerous pools in the highlands during the previous wet season. Freddy was tagged by his namesake, Freddy Cabrera, and the Galapagos Tortoise Programme part time field assistants, Miriam Silva.

Freddy has not excelled himself with dramatic long distance movements since he was tagged. Rather he has not moved more than about 200m form the tagging location. It is likely that he has everything he needs within easy distance, since ground herbs are still abundant for food, and adult females are now migrating into the area in readiness for the nesting season. We will be looking forward to seeing whether Freddy undergoes a long distance into the uplands after the nesting season.



        



Sandra
Tag ID number 1273
Sex Female
Date tagged 28 May 2010
Tagging location Latitude -0.63707
Tagging location Longitude -90.24241
GNP ID number 929
Estimated age 130 years
Sandra the tortoise is named after Mrs. Cabrera, the wife of the Galapagos Tortoise Programme Research Assistant, Freddy. Oddly, Sandra is by far the biggest female tortoise we have tagged so far. This is odd because she a member of the Cerro Fatal population, which in our experience are usually considerably smaller than their “Reserva” counterparts. Sandra was in prime condition, clearly having enjoyed the abundance of annual plants in the arid lowlands of Santa Cruz during the wet season. At the time of tagging (late May 2010), Sandra was most likely getting ready for the nesting season.

During tagging we were joined by our friends at Conservation International, Fernando Ortiz, a great supporter of our programme and his new assistant Chris White. Sandra is carrying a temperature logger on her back, which measures the external air temperature every 2 hours. These amazing little devices, called I”-buttons”, can record temperature with an accuracy of 0.0625 degrees centigrade, and have a battery lifespan of several years.

Every 6 months or so, we will download the data to a laptop computer using a small probe. We can then relate air temperature to patterns of movement of Sandra which will help us understand the role of temperature and other ecological factors in regulating migration and other tortoise behavior.

Sandra may have been born when before the Wright Brothers took to the air, and here she is in 2010 wearing such amazing technology. Our aim is to make all this gadgetry work for conservation of Sandra and her kind. To date Sandra is a home body, hardly moving from her tagging site. Once the nesting season is over, there is a good chance that she will migrate to the highlands for a prolonged feeding season, before returning to the lowlands and starting the whole annual cycle over again.