The iconic animal of the Galápagos Islands is the Galápagos giant tortoise. In fact, Spanish explorers named these islands using the Spanish word for tortoise. So the Galapagos tortoise is more accurately translated as the “tortoise tortoise.”
My father and I, along with all of the other passengers aboard our ship, had the opportunity to learn more about these animals and to stroll among them. Tortoise day took place on Santa Cruz Island with a visit to a tortoise breeding center first. There, we saw endangered young tortoises, separated by subspecies and age, in shelters. Eggs are been collected, incubated at the center, then nurtured until about age five. This practice ensures that predators such as feral cats cannot prey on the eggs or hatchlings. Once they reach five years of age, they are released into the area where their eggs had been gathered.
This practice is indeed helping to repopulate threatened subspecies. There were once fifteen subspecies. Now, only thirteen have survived the many years of human exploitation and habitat destruction, and are now living on seven separate islands.
These monsters have no natural predators, so they have evolved to be giants and to live exceeding long lives, continuing to grow larger during their entire lives. They can weigh up to 900 pounds, and one captive female lived to be 175.
The differences among some of the subspecies provided Darwin with clues that led to his theory of evolution. Tortoises in the lush green highlands have shorter necks, domed shells, and graze on grass and low growing shrubs. The subspecies who live in the lower, dry areas are called saddle-backs, and have a large notch in their shell, through which they can extend their long necks. They have evolved in this fashion in order to eat the cacti in the area, stretching their necks up to nab the fruit. The cacti, in turn, evolving alongside the saddle-back tortoise, have trunks like trees as a defense against the hungry tortoises.
That’s all very interesting, but to actually walk among them was amazing. For this adventure, we were taken to a cattle ranch and nature preserve for tortoises. The ranchers realized there was money to be had by charging tourists to visit the tortoises on their lands.
Donning galoshes to prevent ant bites, we walked among scattered individual tortoises, of all different ages and sizes, chomping away on grass. They paid us no attention, not even pulling in their heads when we came close. And I realized that some of these guys were older than my eighty-eight year old father!
The tortoise’s shell is an adaptive rib cage. You can see that evidence on the inside of a shell. The shell is also his home, and as such, is part of his being. He doesn’t dig a burrow or a nest. He doesn’t find a den or build a house. All his sheltering needs are provided by his own body.
What if we take our cue from the tortoise and realize that all we need is already a part of us? The good life we seek, the treasure we hunt, is intrinsically within. We don’t need to look outside of ourselves. The answer can be found if we go into our interior to discover it. If we live our lives as if all of our spiritual desires can be found as we dig deep into what we already know—from our lived experiences, from our intuition—then we are more than halfway on the journey to our true selves.