Galapágos menaced by tourist invasion
Tourism will wreck the wonders of the Galápagos – where animal and plant life is being wiped out by the arrival of aggressive new species – unless action is taken soonOpening what looks like the drawer of an office filing cabinet, Gustavo Jimenez, a scientist at the Charles Darwin Foundation on the Galápagos, reaches inside, rummages around for a bit, and then pulls out not a report or a file, but a massive stuffed albatross. It's about the size of a toddler, just one of hundreds of stuffed birds and animals in the foundation's vertebrate collection.We have already seen a stuffed Baltra Island iguana, a 4ft-long, scaly, dragon-like creature that was successfully brought back from near-extinction in the 1930s, but has the misfortune to live on one of the two islands that have an airport. About once a month, Jimenez receives a body that has been flattened by a bus...
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