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Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesùs.
Diego is a Galapagos tortoise who came to the San Diego Zoo in the 1930s and was sent back to the Galapagos Islands in the 1970s to be part of their breeding program. Since then, Diego has fathered over 1,000 offspring, thus earning the nickname "Super Diego."
Meet Diego New King of the Galapagos Islands Chelonoidis hoodensis species giant turtle.
QUITO, Ecuador (AP) — Lonesome George's
inability to reproduce made him a global symbol of efforts to halt the
disappearance of species. And while his kind died with him, that doesn't
mean the famed giant tortoise leaves no heir apparent.
The Galapagos Islands have another centenarian who fills a shell pretty well. He's Diego, a prolific, bossy, macho reptile.
Unlike Lonesome George, who died June 24, Diego symbolizes not a dying breed but one resurrected.
Having
sired hundreds of offspring, Diego has been central to bringing the
Espanola Island type of tortoise back from near extinction, rangers at
Galapagos National Park say.
Diego was plucked from Espanola by expeditioners sometime between 1900 and 1930 and wound up in the San Diego Zoo in California, said the head of the park's conservation program, Washington Tapia.
When
the U.S. zoo returned him to the Galapagos in 1975, the only other
known living members of his species were two males and 12 females.
Chelonoidis
hoodensis — some consider it species, some a subspecies — had been all
but destroyed, mostly by domestic animals introduced by humans that ate
their eggs.
So Diego and the
others were placed in a corral at the park's breeding center on Santa
Cruz, the main island in the isolated archipelago whose unique flora and
fauna helped inspire Charles Darwin's work on evolution.
Diego
was so dominant and aggressive, bullying other males with bites and
shoves, that he had to be moved eight years later to his own pen, with
five of the females. The reptiles are not monogamous.
"Diego is
very territorial, including with humans," said his keeper, Fausto
Llerena. "He once bit me, and two weeks ago he tried (again) to bite me.
When you enter his pen, Diego comes near and his intentions aren't
friendly."
A U.S.-based herpetologist for the Galapagos
Conservancy, Linda Cayot, says Diego is the most sexually active of the
bunch because he's the biggest and the oldest of the males.
"In tortoises, the biggest dominates. It's not that the others aren't active. It's just that he's dominant," she says.
Tapia
said it is impossible to know Diego's age, but he is well over 100. He
estimates Diego is the father of 40 to 45 percent of the 1,781 tortoises
born in the breeding program and placed on Espanola island.
At
least 14 species of giant tortoise originally inhabited the islands 620
miles (1,000 kilometers) off Ecuador's Pacific coast and 10 survive,
their features developing in sync with their environment, as Darwin
observed.
Espanola, which encompasses 50 square miles (130 square
kilometers), is arid, and in order to reach vegetation high off the
ground, the tortoises there developed the longest legs and necks of any
other species in the archipelago.
Diego is nearly 3 feet (90 centimeters) long, weighs 176 pounds (80 kilograms), and has a black saddleback shell.
Llerena says tourists take to him automatically, if from a safe distance.
"I think he's going to be the successor to Lonesome George, the new favorite."
A
visit to Lonesome George became de rigueur for celebrities and common
folk alike among the 180,000 people who annually visit the Galapagos.
Among his last visitors were Richard Gere, Prince Charles of England and
Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and family.
Before humans arrived in
the Galapagos, the six islands were home to tens of thousands of giant
tortoises.
Numbers were down to about 3,000 in 1974, but the recovery
program run by the national park and the Charles Darwin Foundation has
succeeded in increasing the overall population to 20,000.
The
offspring of Diego and his male rivals in the corrals of Santa Cruz have
themselves been reproducing in the wild on Espanola island since 1990.
"We can now say that the reproduction of this species is guaranteed," said Tapia.
Cayot
was asked whether having so many children of the same few parents
interbreeding on Espanola could hurt the breed's long-term prospects.
"It could be a problem," she said. "But it is more important to save the species."
