10.8.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome. This is Marsha for Radio I. To day I
will be reading National Geographic magazine. It is September twenty
twenty five, which is donated by the publisher as a reminder.
Radio Eye is a reading service intended for people who
are blind or have other disabilities that make it difficult
to read printed material. Please join me now for the

(00:21):
first article entitled The Dear Devils who keep Lagos Moving.
In the Nigerian metropolis, motorcycle taxi drivers contend with harassment,
chaotic streets and gnarly accidents, but without them, the city
of twenty million would grind to a halt. This article
by Alexis O Kiowo, the fabric of Lagos, Nigeria is

(00:46):
delicately strung together. The mega city spills from the mainland
onto several islands in a lagoon that brushes against the
Atlantic Ocean. It covers an area of about thirteen hundred
square miles, and many Lagusians navigate the sprawling landscape on
the back of a motorcycle taxi or okada. Their dare
devil drivers called riders, zigzag through congested streets, dodging potholes

(01:11):
and pedestrians. As both rider and passenger, or in some
cases multiple passengers try to stay upright and unharmed. Public
transportation here can be inefficient and roads can be difficult
to maneuver on foot. Okadas solve a crucial problem that
the government has been unable to solve for years, says
photographer and National Geographic Explorer Victor Adawale, who was born

(01:36):
and raised in Lagos. Some see okadas as a menace.
Local officials claim riders are responsible for a large portion
of Lagos traffic accidents and robberies are often committed by
people on motorcycles. To improve road safety, bureaucrats have banned
commercial motorcycles from bridges, highways and many other parts of
the city. In twenty nineteen, the government launched the Bus

(01:58):
Reform Initiative, which has deployed hundreds of new buses along
dozens of routes across the region. That hasn't decreased the
population's appetite for okada's, which are still widely used to
ferry commuters to neighborhoods that buses can't reach. Everybody you
see on the streets is riding in defiance of the
ban because they don't have another option. Otdawali says, Traditionally,

(02:22):
the motorcycles have been the cheapest choice for passengers. Some
rides cost the equivalent of less than a US dollar
and have provided a reliable living for those who drive
them in a city where wages can be hard to
come by. I am still riding because my job as
a mechanic is not bringing in the income I need

(02:42):
on time, says Aluwafemei Ipadoda, a friend of Adawali's father,
who has driven okadas for over twenty years to pay
for his children's education. Fares are beginning to rise as
riders factor in the risk of getting caught. Enforcement of
the ban is uneven, but residents still operating okada's are

(03:03):
vulnerable and face harassment from police, who frequently arrest riders
and demand extortion payments in exchange for confiscated motorcycles. People
pay as much as ninety thousand naira fifty seven dollars
to get their motorcycle back. Otdawali says, Sometimes they don't
get it back, sometimes they have to watch it get crushed.

(03:23):
The government has impounded and destroyed thousands of Okada's, a
devastating blow the motorcycles are expensive up to thirty three
times the median annual salary in Lagos, and riders frequently
buy them in installments. Riders haven't taken the ban lying down.
Numerous protests have led to clashes with police, and at

(03:44):
least one okada union has filed a lawsuit against the
government seeking both a repeal of the banded and lost wages.
Odawali's option of Okada's has changed over the years. When
he was a boy, his father, who rode okadas for
twenty five years, use the same bike to take the
family to church on the market and to drop off
Otdawali and his brother at school. His whole family rode

(04:06):
on the back of the motorcycle, which was a marker
of lower social class at the time. He felt ashamed
it would get off the yokada a short distance from
school so his classmates wouldn't see him, but that shame
has now evolved into pride. As Otdawale has watched the
writers navigate these new challenges, they refused to be erased
from the city. Next resurrecting the Lost Tortoises of the

(04:31):
Galopagus by Hannah Nordhaus, they thrilled sailors they inspired Darwin.
Then by the mid nineteenth century, the iconic Florian Floriana
tortoises were gone. Here's how a group of persistent scientists
unlocked the secrets to bringing them back. In October eighteen twenty,

(04:51):
the Nantucket whaling ship Essex laid anchor at a blue
green harbor on the Galapagos Island off Floriana, more than
six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador. The sailors
rowed their whale boats ashore and followed paths trampled by
ancient reptiles, through broken basalts and tangled thickets of salt
bush and cactus. Keeping a sharp lookout, rowed cap'n Boy

(05:16):
Thomas Nickerson for the objects of their search. They were
hunting for Galopicus giant tortoises. The animals varied from island
to island. Some had round domed carapaces, while others had
shells that curved up at the front like Spanish riding saddles,
but all could provide food for multiple sailors. When the
whalers found a small turpin, they'd flip it over, tie

(05:39):
canvas straps to each of the creature's legs, then hoist
the tortoise under their backs like a knapsap. They'd tie
the largest ones, some weighing more than five hundred pounds,
by their legs, to long poles, hauling them two or
three men per side, across sharp and uneven lava rocks
and back to their ship. There they'd stack their captives

(05:59):
upside down in the hold like nesting bowls. Tortoises could
live up to a year without sustenance. They neither eat
nor drank, nor is the least pains taken with them,
wrote Owen Chase, the ship's first mate. They are strewed
over the deck, thrown under foot, or packed away in
the hold as suits convenience. Yessex took more than sixty

(06:20):
of Floriana's tortoises, which had the curved shells known as saddlebacks,
and were, Nicholson wrote, the most rich, flavored and delicious
meat I have ever met with. Then the ship set
off for the Pacific whaling grounds, where a month later
it was rammed by a whale, a disaster that provided
the inspiration for Herman Malville's Moby Dick. The sailors salvaged

(06:44):
as many tortoises from the foundering ship as they could
fit on their small whale boats, eating them and eventually
each other on their ill fated voyage back to the
South American mainland. The other tortoises sank with a ship
or floated away. Yessex was far from alone in its
plundering of Galopicus tortoises. When Charles Darwin arrived at Floriana

(07:04):
in eighteen thirty five on the journey that would spark
his theory of evolution, he heard of whaling vessel vessels
taking as many as seven hundred tortoises on one visit.
Their numbers have of course been greatly reduced in this island,
he wrote. Historians estimate that between seventeen seventy four and
eighteen sixty, passing ships took some one hundred thousand of

(07:26):
the nearly three hundred thousand tortoises that lived on the
islands when the Spanish arrived in fifteen thirty five, driving
populations of all fifteen Galopicus tortoise species into steep decline
and three to extinction. The Floriana tortoise, last seen in
the eighteen fifties, was the first to disappear almost two

(07:46):
centuries later, though the Floriana tortoise is said to become
the first extinct Galopicus species to be returned to its
ancestral home. The revival of these gigantic creatures arrives at
a moment when the resurrection of dire wolves is making
headlines and scientists are working to retrieve the genes of
other long gone creatures like wooly mammos. But such prehistoric

(08:11):
species would return to a world that has lived without
them for millennia. The descendants of the Floriana tortoises, by contrast,
will be re induced to the place where they once belonged,
playing a critical role in an ecosystem that still desperately
needs them. To accomplish that, a team of dedicated scientists
has not only pushed the frontiers of genetic sequences sequencing

(08:35):
to identify a species that had been hidden from plain view,
but also traveled to remote corners of the archipelago and
sorted through bones and shells from dusty archives to right
one of the great wrongs of Galopogus history. This improbable
scientific journey began in two thousand as a team of
conservation scientists traped through the densely vegetated gullies at the

(08:59):
base of the included Wolf Volcano on the northwest island
of Isabella. They confirmed earlier observations that some of the
tortoises there looked different. The animals had saddleback shells, a
sign that they were a separate species from the more
familiar domed ones. On the volcano's higher, wetter slopes, there

(09:19):
were pockets of tortoises that looked out of place, remembers
conservation biologist James Gibbs, a National Geographic explorer and leader
of the Galopagus Conservancy, whose which works to protect and
restore the archipelago's wild ecosystems. To learn more, Gibbs and
the team took blood samples from every unusual looking tortoise

(09:40):
they encountered, placing identification tags on as many as they could,
and sent the specimens to their research partner at Ad
del Gisa, Gizella Cocone, and a evolutionary biologist at Yale
University and a National Geographic explorer. When she analyzed their DNA,
she couldn't identify their genetic sequences. They didn't match those

(10:03):
of any living tortoise species in her genetic database. Cacone
was bewildered. I called them aliens, she says. We didn't
know where they came from. The researchers considered the possibility
that some of those aliens could have floated ashore from
whaling ships like the Essex Banks Bay on the volcanoes
Western Flank was the final Galopagus anchorage for many ships

(10:26):
on their way to the whaling grounds, and sailors were
known to sometimes throw their surplus overboard before setting sail.
Some of those unwonted animals may have floated to shore
and ascended the volcanoes Ragged Flank, living among the native
tortoises and eventually breeding with them. The whalers were responsible
for the loss of so many tortoises, killing and eating

(10:47):
most and carrying a number back home as trophies or pets,
but perhaps the scientists speculated they had also inadvertently insured
the survival of the animal's genes. Only after several asis
in genetic sequencing technology, with the group realized the sailors
had provided important clues to revive us species. Scientists have

(11:10):
been working to save the giant tortoises of the Galopogus
since the middle of the twentieth century. When only a
few thousand were left on the entire archipelago. The whalers
were gone, but tortoises had continued to fall prey to
the creatures they brought with them, rats, pig, dogs and
ants that fed on eggs and hatchlings, and goats and
donkeys that disrupted and devoured their food supply. Galopogus National

(11:34):
Park officials knew they had to do something or risk
losing entire species. Beginning in the nineteen sixties, conservation teams
used the limited tools then available to save them. They
started on Espanola Island, east of Floriana, where the population
had been reduced to fourteen individuals. Between nineteen sixty four
and nineteen seventy four, park officials moved all the tortoises

(11:57):
from the island to the Charles Darwin Research Station at
the park's headquarters on Santa Cruz Island, with the help
of a strapping mail brought in from the San Diego
Zoo that, according to records, had come from Espanola in
the nineteen thirties. They bred thousands of young after a
laborious campaign to eradicate goats from the island. They then

(12:20):
reintroduced the hatchlings, and today more than three thousand tortoises
lived there. Park teams replicated that success on other islands
as well, But despite those triumphs, there was one glaring disappointment,
not finding a mate for the very last tortoise on
Pinta Island north of Floriana. Scientists had rescued the animal,

(12:40):
they named Lonesome George from his native island in the
early nineteen seventies, transporting him to a quarrel at the
park's research station in hopes of preventing a fourth species
from going extinct. In the years that followed, they actiously
searched for a partner. They first scoured Pinta with no look.

(13:01):
Then they placed females of other species with saddle backed
shells that resembled those of the Pinta in George's corral
at the research center. When he showed no interest in breeding,
they tried artificial insemination. The females did finally nest in
George's corral, but the eggs were all infertile. By the
early two thousands, the conservation icon was close to one

(13:23):
hundred years old and time was running out for the species.
At the same time, developments in genomes sequencing were allowing
Cocone to expand her tool kit to identify the Wolf
Volcano eid aliens. In two thousand and six, she used
a new method of dnaal analysis to retest the samples.
She made the astonishing discovery that the scientists had collected

(13:46):
blood from a tortoise whose genes appeared to be fifty
percent Pinta. Perhaps it wasn't too late for lonesome George,
and they could find Pinta relatives on the island and
save the species. Thrilled, she proposed that the park scent
another expedition to the volcano. We said, we have to
go back there. We need to find this animal. If
there is one, there could be many more. Still trying

(14:09):
to pinpoint the other strange Wolf Volcano genes, she also
began to look more closely at the three species than
believed to have gone extinct, the Santa Fe tortoise, the
ferninad Fernandina tortoise, and the Floriana tortoise. Without the DNA
of live animals to compare to the alien genes, the
only cells available for sequencing were from old specimens carried

(14:32):
across the ocean by whalers or scientific collectors. We went
around to museums to collect samples of bone and skin,
Cocona says. At the American Museum of Natural History they
found bones of New York Naturalism had unearthed in nineteen
twenty eight from lava caverns on Floriana deep chasms where

(14:52):
some tortoises had tumbled and died. At Harvard University's Museum
of Comparative Zoology, they found bones and shells in eighteen
thirty four and eighteen seventy two. They were very porous,
she says, gray looking crumbly and desiccated. Even so, she
managed to scrape enough genetic material to obtain sequences of

(15:13):
their DNA and booms. She says the alien tortoises were
in the same clade ancestral grouping with Floriana. The saddlebacks
were hybrids of the native Wolf Volcano domed species mixed
with the long extinct Floriana saddleback species. The scientist's speculations

(15:33):
had been correct. The whaler's castaways castaway tortoises had survived
an inch or bread. In two thousand and eight, a
large expedition returned to Wolf Volcano to collect more samples
so the team could get a better idea of how
many Floriana and Pinta tortoises were on the island, and
searched for possible mates for George. Teams from the Park

(15:54):
and the Galopagus Conservancy set up camps around Wolf Volcano
and collected blood samples from sixteen hundred sixty seven tortoises,
placing identification tags on each one. In her Yale lab,
Cocone analyzed those samples against her expanded database and found
seventeen tortoises with Pinta genes and eighty four with Floriana ancestry.

(16:17):
Still hoping to find more pintas, the Park team embarked
on the lengthy process of planning, permitting, and funding another
expedition to the volcano with a helicopter and nets to
allow them to retrieve those hybrids. But in June twenty twelve,
lonesome George's keeper found him dead in his corral, end
of his line, end of his species. Later under cropsy

(16:40):
would reveal George had an anatomical problem with his sperm
duct and was probably incapable of reproducing. As scientists relinquished
the idea of saving the pinta species. They focused on
the Floriana hybrids. People had given up hopes so long
ago for the species. Explains Gibbs that it took some
time for the researchers to understand the opportunity that these

(17:03):
numerous living relics presented, But when they did, they realized, Wow,
this is actually as significant as finding pinted tortoises on
Wolf Volcano, says Gibbs. It was then that the conservation
team began to consider a radical proposal, capturing and breeding
the descendants of the species and repopulating Floriana, where the

(17:25):
animals hadn't lived for more than one hundred and fifty years.
Returning tortoises to Floriana wasn't important solely because scientists had
found a lost species. It was also ecologically critical. Here
in the galopagus, Darwin had observed that species were exquisitely
adapted to their habitat. Only recently have ecologists begun to

(17:47):
realize how exquisitely adapted habitats are to the creatures that
live there. When the last tortoise disappeared from Floriana, the
island's species suffered. Important native plants began to die off
while populations of invasive pests, plants, and livestock exploded, eating
or out competing native plants and animals. By the end

(18:09):
of the nineteenth century, the islands mocking birds, racer snakes,
rails and hawks had disappeared. In the years that followed, finches,
barn owls, lava gulls, and vermilion flycatchers went missing too.
Ark officials hoped to mend the hole in the ecosystem
the lost tortoises had left behind. Without giant herbivores, the

(18:29):
balance of an island ecosystem can collapse, says Washington Waco Tapia,
a biologist who has worked in galopagus conservation since the
nineteen nineties. Tortoises are ecosystem engineers, shaping vegetation as they
move like bulldozers across the landscape. They flattened the ground
and opened the land for small reptiles, ground nesting seabirds,

(18:52):
and native plants, says Tapia. Keeping weeds at bay helping
native cacti regenerate, spreading seeds with their dung in creating
ponds and wallows that also harbor other species. Researchers knew
that the animals had helped restore ecological balance on other islands.
On Espanola, for example, scientists observed native grasses and cacti

(19:15):
recovering along with the lazo liverts, lava liverts, and albatross
that declined in the tortoise's absence. Where the giant reptiles
have returned, ecosystems have flourished. This is a bit of
a change of mind and restoration notes are turo Iszuriata Valerie,
who until recently was the park's director. Today, conservation teams

(19:39):
bring back missing animals with a focus on an extended ecosystem.
Restoration scientists new knowledge of species genetics allows them to
make certain they are breeding creatures that are truly suited
to surviving there. The goal of all this work has
never been to do de extinction or recreate the Floriana tortoise,

(19:59):
says University of Newcastle conservation biologist Evelyn Jensen, a former
postdoc of Kutchon's, because that's never been possible. Tortoises lived
too long and take too much time to reproduce, and
achieving something close to purity, she says, would be a
five hundred year project. The goal instead is for the
descendants of the extinct species to return, survive, and fulfill

(20:22):
their ancestors' ecological role in their native habitat. But Floriana
had changed dramatically since a native tortoise last roamed the island.
Now there's a community of one hundred and fifty people there,
along with their pets and livestock, and thousands of rats
and feral cats that, if left alone, would eat eggs

(20:42):
and hatchlings and compromise the species' ability to reproduce. Soon
after setting their sights on the Floriana species, park officials
began meeting with the island's residents to secure their approval
for a plan to poison and trap the rats and cats.
These invasive animals would need to be eradicated or strenuously
suppressed to ensure tortoises would once again populate the island.

(21:06):
As those negotiations moved forward, the park finally put preparations
in place to send an expedition to retrieve the hybrids
from the volcano in twenty fifteen. The scientists arrived just
before the wet season, spreading out across the volcano, using
machetes to push through the thick underbrush. You don't have
shade water, says Tapia. There are ticks all over your body.

(21:30):
It was a grueling landscape, which made the survival of
these transplanted creatures all the more remarkable. When the rainfall began,
the Enkanyata's ravines that flood during storms began to flow.
We could hear tortoises crawling from all over to the waters,
he says. Researchers gathered two or three at a time,
then as the helicopter hovered overhead, they loaded them into

(21:53):
a large net and dropped them onto cushioned beds of
car tires on the ship's deck, stacking them up in
the hall, much as the whalers had two centuries earlier.
It looked like a Noah's Ark for tortoises. Kuchone says.
At the end, the hull was full, and we'd put
them everywhere on the sides. The team found thousands and

(22:13):
thousands of tortoises on the secluded volcano, but Kuchone says,
and collected thirty Floriana hybrids, but they couldn't bring them
to Floriana yet. Instead, they would have to transport the
animals to the National Park's breeding center on Santa Cruz
Island in hopes of building a healthy population. Kuchone's scientific

(22:34):
insights continued to guide the team after the expedition. Once
the adults arrived at the research station, she analyzed their
genes to create a stud book, a list of the
individuals with high proportions of Floriana jeans. The objective was
to match up the hybrids to both increase Floriana jenes
in their offspring and protect their genetic diversity. If we

(22:56):
release all identical individuals and a virus comes by, she says,
they could be wiped out. When it came time to
make them. The breeding team placed three hambras females with
two MACHOs. Any more and the males would get into fights.
The tennis ball sized eggs produced from those couplings, up
to fifteen per clutch, hatched in incubators. The hatchlings, each

(23:19):
about the size of the palm of your hand, then
moved to age sordid corrals to mature until they were
big enough to survive reintroduction at around five years old.
All of the wolf tortoises offspring have proved to be
incredibly fit and robust, says Gibbs. Today, six hundred Floriana
hybrids live in the breeding center, and three hundred are

(23:40):
old enough for reintroduction down a sandy path in the
far reaches of the research station. Park, breeding director Freddy
Villaba throws an armful of branches of Plorotilla and introduced
tree with large, she shield shaped leaves into a shaddy,
shady corral that contains one hundred forty one of the

(24:02):
oldest and biggest Floriana hatchlings, each now nearly two feet
long and ready to return to the island. They converge
on their food, extending their long necks and hissing as
they jockey for position, climbing over each other like monster
trucks to get to the branches and soon reducing their
breakfast to gray, desiccated stalks. Valaba calls this enclosure the

(24:24):
choral de las iocas home of the Crazies. Kachone knows
more about these young tortoises than was conceivable even a
decade ago. She has now sequenced multiple genomes of all
the living Galopocus tortoise species using nuclear DNA, the individual
genetic manual that makes you who you are. As her

(24:44):
colleague Evelyn Jensen, explains that in depth nuclear genome analysis
has provided some additional surprises. Keachoni's early work had shown
that the Wolf volcano aliens had a mix of Floriana,
Isabella and Pinta ancestry, but after examining more museum specimens,
Caconi and Jensen's Jensen realized that the wolf hybrids had

(25:07):
less Pinta ancestry than they originally thought. Instead, the team
found genes from Espanola tortoises. It's not just two species hybridizing,
it can be three, or maybe even four, says Jensen.
This is a good thing the scientists belief with complex ancestry,
she adds, they're actually quite genetically diverse. What will happen

(25:27):
next remains a scientific mystery. Perhaps the hybrids with the
most native genes will flourish on Floriana, but the island
is a different place now, a novel ecosystem, as the
ecologists say, where native organisms mix with human introduced ones.
The locosts will have to contend with thickets of invasive
BlackBerry shrubs and lemon and guava trees brought by early

(25:51):
human settlers, with scarcer stands of the cactus they love
to eat, and a change in climate. Ecosystems don't stand still,
either species or their genes. The team will put the
tortoises on the island, saskatchone, then let natural selection take
its course. Whatever survives will probably be best suited to live
on the island. She says. Whatever survives will have some

(26:13):
genes from Floriana to help the newcomers. The park and
a local conservation group have over the past several years
prepared a number of measurers to wipe out the invasive
cats and rats that pose a risk to tortoises. At
the end of twenty twenty three is the culmination of
that effort. Two ultra light helicopters lifted above Floriana and

(26:35):
scattered many thousands of blue kibble sized pellets of rat
poison over areas unpopulated by people, while teams spread pellets
by hand near homes and farms and set out traps
and poisoned sausages to kill the cats. Park officials had
planned to put the first tortoises on the island the
following December, when the onset of the rainy season would

(26:57):
ensure more food for the young reptiles, but the but
camera traps found that forty or fifty rats had survived
the poison, and they postponed the reintroductions. They now planned
to release the tortoises when the rains begin to fall
later next year. Even without full eradication, however, the ecosystem
has begun to rebound with fewer cats and rats. Floriana cuckoos,

(27:21):
mocking birds and doves have come back. Earlier this year,
park workers heard the song of a gloagus rail, a
bird last seen on the island in eighteen thirty five,
a musical chi chi chi chru, not heard since the
days of the whalers. When the locas finally go home,
they'll travel by ship to a wharf in the small

(27:43):
village of Puerta velasco Ibera, then in trucks to the
east side of the island. As they approach the highlands,
park rangers will complete the journey by strapping the animals
weighing up to thirty pounds, onto their backs, much the
same way those whalers carried away their forebeads. This concludes
readings from National Geographic for to day. Your reader has

(28:05):
been Marsha. Thank you for listening, Keep on listening and
have a great day