Galapagos - working with CI

I set up my office in the outside patio - nice and cool with the breeze.

I am assisting the people at the Conservation International (CI) office in Galapagos with two projects. The first is a research vessel, actually a "barge" called Tiburon Martillo (hammerhead shark in spanish) which will be posted in the Wolf and Darwin Islands, a remote part of the Galapagos archipelago.

These islands are just big rocks in the middle of the ocean, but there's a lot going on: they are a major breeding ground for hammerhead and whale sharks, and have some of the last remaining coral in the Galapagos, after 90% of it was wiped out by the last few El Nino events. More tour operators are coming to the area as the SCUBA diving is world-class, and some consider it the best in the world in terms of watching megafauna. The islands are also a haven for fishing - legal and illegal. The mafia-like illegal shark fin industry supplying the Asian market has exploded in the Pacific and there are even boats coming from Costa Rica to exploit the sharks, which in turn is destroying the ecosystem, which depends on sharks for top-down control.


The fisherman's wharf in the Puerto Ayora waterfront, where they sell fillets of "pescado blanco" for $2/lb.

The "Tiburon Martillo" barge will stay in this isolated area, with a crew of 7 or 8, to conduct scientific research, monitor, and enforce regulations. Its a major endeavor, logistically and financially, and my role is to figure out how to better integrate the private sector (tourism and fishing) with this project.

The second project CI is doing here is the "Zero Anchors" initiative, which is trying to set up mooring balls along all the anchorages that are heavily visited by tourism boats. After you see the size of the boats at Puerto Ayora it is easy to understand why this is so important - 50 foot boats are dwarfed by several mini-cruise ships and mega-yachts that take tourists around to each of the islands every week. Their anchor and chain can clear 100 feet of whatever is on the seafloor, and more when the seas are rough. There are literally scrubbing clean the very habitat that the tourists are coming to see - hence the hope that they'll be able to use (and pay for) these mooring balls, instead of their anchoring equipment.

I'm excited about what I'll be doing, particularly since it's quite open ended - and I'm hoping that I can get on some of those boats...



View of the Puerto Ayora pier and anchorage from the top floor of the supermarket, Proinsular.