the-BA : And then there was one

Sam Turvey contemplates Lonesome George

Lonesome George: the Life and Loves of a Conservation Icon by Henry Nicholls (Macmillan, 2006)

Conservation is never simple, but the situation becomes increasingly desperate when endangered species decline to the last few survivors. These sorry individuals, sometimes lingering for years in captivity, have often been elevated to celebrity status by their human observers.
Martha, the last passenger pigeon, and Benjamin, the (possibly) last Tasmanian tiger, focus our environmental guilt and make extinction feel personal, and in doing so have acquired tremendous posthumous fame. However, these extinct A-listers all lived and died before the development of modern conservation attitudes.
In today’s more ecologically enlightened and scientifically capable age, can we do any better when dealing with other species of extreme rarity? The fascinating story of Lonesome George, the only surviving Pinta tortoise (Geochelone nigra abingdoni), shows how far we still have to go.

George discovered

The giant tortoises of the Galápagos archipelago are one of the classic examples of evolution, having developed into different subspecies with distinct shell shapes in response to conditions on different islands. However, as with many other insular animals, they have been severely impacted by human activities.
The practice of hunting tortoises as provisions for long sea voyages wiped them out on Santa Fe, Floreana and Fernandina, and a lack of any tortoise sightings after 1906 from the remote island of Pinta led scientists to fear the worst for this population as well.
However, in 1971 a biologist searching for snails on the island came face to face with a solitary tortoise, eking out a living in competition with 20,000 feral goats. This lone male – named after the American comedian George Gobel – was quickly relocated to the Charles Darwin Research Station (CDRS) on Santa Cruz, where he has been a major tourist attraction and unwitting flagship for conservation ever since.

Unresponsive George

George’s discovery and subsequent life at the CDRS are now the subject of a biography by science writer Henry Nicholls. George himself has remained relatively healthy (bar a slight thyroid problem) and has done very little for the past few decades. However, his lack of interest in female tortoises has hindered attempts to preserve any Pinta genes for future tortoise generations – and has even raised questions about his sexual orientation.
As Nicholls engagingly reminds us, our knowledge of stimulating tortoise reproduction remains limited, and we are still ‘struggling with the whims of reptilian semen’. Indeed, the book is full of fascinating facts about the sexual lives not only of tortoises but also many other animals, which are as fun to read as they must have been to write. One learns, for instance, that touching an elephant’s penis during artificial stimulation is ‘not helpful’ for those valuing their personal safety.

Conservation critique

Nicholls ably illustrates the exhaustive conservation efforts now in place to prevent the decline of other Galápagos tortoise populations, and also the dilemmas faced by managers at the CDRS, but he is critical of some of the decisions made about George.
Now that we know he is most closely related to tortoises from the distant island of Española, why have no Españolan females been encouraged to mate with him? And could more efforts have been made to stimulate George’s mating behaviour and cryopreserve his sperm?
Even Charles Darwin himself doesn’t escape criticism – he displayed a cavalier attitude to Galápagos wildlife when he visited the archipelago, didn’t recognise the evolutionary significance of the tortoises, and helped eat several of them.
More recently, George has been the subject of death threats as a result of acrimonious disputes over the region’s sea cucumber fishery.

Extinction and recovery

Nicholls does George proud in this enjoyable book. He also finds room to describe wider conservation issues such as the consequences of tourism and population growth in the Galápagos, and the problems faced by evolutionarily innovative but ecologically fragile island faunas.
In our modern era of biodiversity loss, increasing numbers of other species – such as Spix’s macaw, the ivory-billed woodpecker and the Yangtze River dolphin – are in danger of dwindling to extinction long before George. He himself is likely to live on for many more decades, even centuries, and so it is quite possible that future technological advances will be able to engineer the recovery of the Pinta tortoise.

Dr Sam Turvey is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London
Samuel.Turvey@ioz.ac.uk

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	Mobile phones and children - Children face risks

	Mobile phones and children-UK code of practice

	And then there was one

	Joys and duties of a scientist

	Scientists in the pay of industry

	Creationism reviving; science recruitment declining

	All hail the new Science Supremo