Definition

• Aquaculture- business of cultivating marine or freshwater food fish or shellfish, such as oysters, clams, salmon, and trout, under controlled conditions.

Aquaculture in the US 

• Current research goals
• Genetic improvement of aquatic species
• Aquatic animal health management
• Reproduction and early development
• Sustainability and environmental compatibility of aquaculture
• Quality and safety of aquaculture products for consumers

Offshore aquaculture

• Because there are few regions on San Cristobal where aquaculture can be implemented, it would make most sense for us to implement offshore aquaculture
• Major issue- leasing regions in the ocean- who is allowed to start agriculture developments in certain areas?
• Possible solution- designate a certain region of the ocean to be an agricultural zone, and have the government lease it out as if it were land.

Resources required for offshore aquaculture

• Marine based
• Cages for breeding, growth and development, and containment.
• Moorings, food distribution system, and cage cleaners.
• Service boats
• Land based
• Service vehicles
• Fish transport vehicle

• Solar - Thermal
  • Direct heat from the sun, concentrated in some manner to produce heat at
  • useful temperatures- can heat homes or create steam for electricity generation
  • Parabolic trough- focuses sunlight on tube that carries heat-absorbing fluid
    • fluid circulated through boiler where heat is used to boil water to steam
    • steam routed to turbine to generate electricity.
• Solar Photovoltaic
  • uses semiconducting materials to convert sunlight directly into electricity
  • photons from sunlight excite electrons that create current
• Geothermal energy?
  • underground reservoirs of steam, hot water, and hot dry rocks. Hot water or steam extracted from geothermal reservoirs in earth's crust-supplied to steam turbines to produce electricity.
• Hydroelectric
  • not good for galapagos
• Wind
• Municipal Solid Waste
  • Total Waste excluding Industrial, Agriculutural, and Sewage Sludge waste
  • Example: Appliances, newspapers, clothing, food scraps, boxes, paper, wood, rubber tires, etc.
• Four Components
  • Recycling
    • Energy expensive and takes a lot of space
    • Materials would have to be transported back to the mainland or special portable systems would need to be designed (many implications)
      
  • Composting
    • Very efficient for the disposal of waste, though it takes time and space
      
  • Landfilling
    • Produces methane that can be combusted for energy, thought pollutant as well
      
  • Waste-to-Energy via Incineration
    • Reduces waste by 90% of volume, the rest can be shipped off the islands (what difficulties may arise with this?)
    • Can be designed with air pollution controls and energy recovery can be optimized with advancing technology
    • Expensive, but creates energy while disposing of waste at the same time
    • Drawbacks: without highly expensive set-up procedures and maintainence, this process is potentially very pollutant

Education in the Galapagos is extremely important for a number of reasons. A strong fundamental education can encourage the natives on the island to explore their possibilities in life. With a solid education, they can seek jobs in a broad number of fields rather than sticking to the conventional jobs involving tourism and fishing that may harm the environment. Furthermore, a strong environmental education for both natives and tourists will spread awareness about the importance and uniqueness of biodiversity on the islands. Once the people understand the significance of preserving the environment, they may take action to help reduce the harmful effects of civilization on the ecosystem.

Environmental Education

Environmental Education Centers for Galapagos Youth

The Environmental Education centers (CEA), developed in 1997, aim to bring together conservation and environmental specialists, and local students and teachers. They have been developed on a number of the Galapagos Islands, including Isabela, Santa Cruz, and San Cristobal. Each center includes infrastructure, equipment, library, and specialized personnel for service to the community. The centers focus on educating the community on the importance of marine preservation, the problems of invasive species, and the participation of the community in conservation through a number of innovative programs:

Teachers on Board

Educating teachers on the importance of biodiversity is one of the best ways to incorporate environmental education into local schools. Teachers are taken to other islands outside where they live and work. They are taught about the ecosystem and wildlife. The knowledge they obtain from this program can then be used to develop a curriculum on nature and conservation.

Funds for Local Action in Conservation

Conservation efforts cannot succeed without the necessary resources. This program has funded forty-three local groups interested in strengthening conservation efforts. These groups focus mainly on education in a variety of environmentally related topics, including. Some examples of programs include: Hydroponics and family gardens, town murals and slogans, development of educational materials, Galapagos beach protection, expansion of educational games, production of brochures and magazines with conservation themes, restoration of botanical gardens, construction of an “ecological park”, and Galapagos coastal cleanup

Friends of the Tortoises

Through this program, children of Isabella are able to learn about tortoises and how to protect and care for them. They are allowed to visit tortoise-breeding centers on Isabella, where they participate in breeding and rearing process of tortoises. The children can then share what they learned through the center with others in their communities.

Children Scientists on Board

This program, based in San Cristobal, allows children to travel on board a number of tour boats to visit the different islands. The children travel with logbooks to take observations on the ecosystem and the wildlife. They are given the opportunity to see the archipelago and wildlife of the Galapagos as well as learning valuable information about conservation and monitoring activities from the crews of the tour boats.

The GLOBE Program (Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment)

This program unites students, teachers, and scientists around the world to get a better understanding of the world’s environment. Around 3000 elementary and high schools from more than 70 countries participate in this program.

Students collect data about their local environment, including atmosphere, ecology, and biology. All the data from around the world is collected in a database, where students can access information and exchange scientific data with other students.

Not only does this program allow students in the Galapagos to become more aware of the environment they live in, but it also educates other students around the world on the ecology of the Galapagos.

Communications Dissemination Program

Awareness of the environmental situation in the Galapagos is a prerequisite to conservation. The goal of the Communications Dissemination Program, started by the Charles Darwin Foundation, is to spread awareness through audiovisual and graphic elements that focus on educating the population about the ecosystem in which they live.

A local television show, “Archijuegalo,” is an example of one of the audiovisual programs. The themes of this game show where high school students compete against one another are the exploitation of marine resources and the danger of introduced species.

Social Action for the Prevention of Invasive Species

A major part of preventing the introduction of invasive species is increasing the independence of the Galapagos Islands, so that it does not have to depend as much on imports from the mainland, one of the most likely sources for invasive species. A communication program has been set up to promote safe agricultural policies. This program has set up workshops on the three main inhabited islands about the use of pesticides and the management of seed-plots. Model farms have been built, and a list of permitted, restricted, and prohibited products has been drawn up. The program also provides farmers with technical advice and training so they are more able to handle the new environmentally safe technologies that can be found in the model farms.

Problems

There seems to be a good number of programs set up to educate the people on the environment. However, what is missing is much incentive to participate in the programs. Another issue with the current environmental education programs set up is that they focus too much on learning about the ecology of the Galapagos and less about what needs to be done to move toward conservation. Furthermore, most of the programs focus on children in the Galapagos, when a large contributing factor to current environmental problems is the adults that live on the islands. Finally, too much focus is being placed on environmental education, and too little on formal education itself.

Solutions

Create incentive to participate in programs

Give the people a reason to participate in the environmental education programs. There are many was to go about this. One great incentive is money. Teachers that participate in the “Teachers on Board” program could be paid more to teach students about the environment and ecology of the islands. Students in the “Friends of the Tortoises” program can be paid for helping out with breeding and raising the tortoises. Farmers who participate in the program to prevent the introduction of invasive species could be subsidized for their efforts to use environmentally safe products and to incorporate aspects of the model farms into their own farms. (The experimental farm technology could be given to the farmers for free). Other incentives include allowing the children who are part of “Children Scientists on Board” to travel not with local tour boats but with fancy international tour companies and tour guides.

Expand the scope of environmental education

Part of living in a village on the Galapagos Islands and trying to conserve the environment involves things such as recycling to reduce the amount of waste and conserving water and energy to save resources and reduce pollution. Although it is important for the inhabitants of the islands to understand the importance of conservation of the ecosystem, it is equally if not more important that they know how to go about conserving the environment. Therefore, programs focusing on educating the public about things such as water conservation, energy conservation, and recycling should be established. They can be similar to the programs that travel around American elementary schools educating students on drug use, cigarette use, and recycling.

Expand the target audience

Children are influenced to a great extent by their parents. Therefore, to interest a child on the importance of preserving the environment of the Galapagos, the parents need to be interested and well informed as well. Programs that are now open to children of the Galapagos should be open to adults as well. Perhaps fishermen that learn about the devastating effects their fishing has on the sea cucumber population (and consequently the rest of the food chain), he or she may decide to tone down their illegal fishing activities. Although this example may seem idealistic, it is nevertheless important that adults are aware of the effects of their actions on the environment as well as the significance of preserving the Galapagos.

Encourage and improve formal education

Although the immediate future of the Galapagos depends to a certain extent on the awareness of the population of the Galapagos environment, the long-term future of the islands depends on the formal education of the people. Students who attend high school and college are more likely to find jobs in sectors other than fishing and tourism, both industries that harm the environment to varying extents. In order to stop illegal fishing and slow down tourism, it is necessary to shift the native population of the Galapagos away from those sectors, since the demand for sea cucumbers and the number of tourists are unlikely to decrease. Children of the Galapagos should be paid to go to school, as are many children in developing countries such as Brazil, in order to discourage them from spending their time working or in other pursuits. Furthermore, scholarships should be awarded to students of the Galapagos to attend colleges, an important step to the high level education that will give the student more options than a fisherman or a tour guide.

San Cristobal, also known as Chatham, is the easternmost island in the Galápagos. It is the site of the only permanent stream in the archipelago and is also where Darwin first went ashore in 1835. San Cristobal is also the site of the oldest surviving settlement in the Galapagos, El Progresso, established in 1869. It has since been overshadowed by a second town, Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, located on the southeast coast. This is one of two points of departure for tour boats operating in the islands and nearly half the islands' 50,000 annual tourists pass through its airport, which has operatied since the mid-1980s.

San Cristobal island is made up of two coalesced volcanoes. The southwestern half is a symmetric shield volcano made up of gently-dipping lavas and capped by a thick, deeply-weathered pyroclastic blanket and numerous satellite cinder cones. The southwestern shield became emergent around 2.4 million years ago; activity continued up to about 650,000 years ago. The northeastern half of the island is a more recently active volcano, dominated by eruptions from NE-trending fissures. The most recent flows are no more than a few centuries old. Like its neighbors, Santa Cruz and Santa Fe, it lavas show very considerable chemical variation, with some being similar to basalts erupted at mid-ocean ridges (this kind of basalt is often called MORB ­ for Mid-Ocean Ridge Basalt). In stark contrast to Hawaiian volcanoes, there is no clear petrologic evolutionary trend displayed by San Cristobal lavas.

The first "permanent" human inhabitant of the Galapagos was an Irishman by the name of Patrick Watkins, who was marooned on Floreana in 1807. He spent 8 years there, raising vegetables and selling them to visiting whaling ships before stealing a boat and sailing to the mainland. Villamil's colonists on Floreana were the next inhabitants. After a few years, however, they abandoned their settlement, although it had been successful, because the government of Ecuador had decided to also establish a prison colony there. The Ecuadorian government continued to maintain prison colonies in the Galapagos until the middle of the twentieth century. Villamil then developed schemes for establishing coal mines on Santiago and later for mining guano, but nothing became of them for the simple reason that there is no coal and far too little guano to mine. One resource was expoited on Santiago, though: salt was mined from the salt lake near James Bay and used for salting fish and tortoise meat.

In 1869, a colony named Progesso was established on San Cristobal under the leadership of Manuel Cobos. Cobos was hardly a progressive, however, and his tyranny led to his murder several years later. The colony survived and San Cristobal remains the seat of government in the Galapagos today. In 1893 Don Antonio Gil established a colony on the southeast coast of Isabela, which he called Villamil, and another, Santo Tomas, 20 km inland, high on the slopes of Sierra Negra. The latter was established to mine sulfur from the fumeroles in the area. Around Villamil, coral was mined and burned to produce lime. This was supplemented by fishing and cattle ranching on the moist windward slopes of Sierra Negra. These towns remain today.

European and American interest in the Galapagos was stimulated by the publication of William Beebe's book Galapagos: World's End in 1924. This book inspired the beginnings of the eco-tourism that today dominates the Galapagos economy. Tourism began, however, as only a trickle (one of those early tourists was U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who visited the islands in 1938). There was also a trickle of Europeans immigration to the Galapagos around this time. The largest group was 60 Norwegians, persuaded to settle on Floreana in 1927 by several young jounalists and a whaler who had writen about the Galapagos. Floreana turned out to be anything but the paradise the promoters promised, as the colonists came to realize after the promoters left. Most managed to survive for a difficult year or two there. Some of the survivors eventually returned to Norway, others moved to the settlement on San Cristobal, and others settled on Academy Bay on Santa Cruz, joining another group of Norwegians that had set up a cannery there the year before. Within a few years, most of these colonist left as well, but a few remained. A few years later, other Norwegians came to Santa Cruz, as well as a sprinkling of others from Europe, America, and Ecuador, all seeking a simpler life. Among them were the four Angermeyer brothers from Germany, who settled on Santa Cruz in 1935. Their descendents still live there and operate touring yachts and a hotel in Puerto Ayora. One of their daughters, Johanna Angermeyer, wrote an excellent book about their life there, My Father's Island.

In the early 1930's, several groups of Europeans settled on Floreana; first Dr. Friedrich Ritter and his mistress Dore Strauch from Germany, followed by the Wittmer family, also from Germany, and finally Austrian "Baroness" Wagner de Bosquet and her entourage of 3 men, Robert Philippson, Rudolf Lorenz, and Felipe Valdiviseo. Dr. Ritter and the Baroness appear to have been particularly curious characters. After the Baroness's arrival, disputes broke out among the groups, particularly between the Baroness and just about everyone else. In 1934, a series of bizzare deaths occurred that have been the subject of much speculation ever since. First, the Baroness and Philippson disappeared without a trace. Shortly after that, Lorenz turned up dead on Marchena (one of the northern islands). Later in the same year, Ritter, a vegetarian died of food poisoning as a result of eating chicken. Dore Strauch returned to Germany shortly thereafter. A few other somewhat mysterious deaths occurred in the decades that followed. The details of the "Floreana Mystery" may be read in any of several books written about it. Frau Wittmer's excellent book, Floreana, provides a first hand account of these events as well as a fascinating account her 65 years on Floreana (now in her nineties, Frau Wittmer still lives on Floreana).

In World War II, the U.S. Navy obtained permission from the Ecuadorian government to establish bases in the Galapagos to guard the approaches to the Panama Canal. An airbase was established on Baltra and a radar station on the north end of Isabela. These were abandoned shortly after the war. The airbase was given to the Ecuadorian government, and eventually transformed into the present commercial airport, operated by the Ecuadorian air force. (Subsequently, airports were built on San Cristobal and Isabela.)

The year 1935, the one hundreth anniversary of Darwin's visit, was something of a turning point in Galapagos history, as the Ecuadorian government decreed parts of the islands as wildlife preserves. Four centuries of human presence had had an adverse effect on its unique fauna. Three of the 14 races of tortoises were gone forever and populations of others were vastly reduced (a single individual remains of the Pinta race). The native rice rat, one of the few indiginous Galapagos mammals (two native rat species and one bat species), was already extinct on many islands. Plants introduced on the settled islands were replacing the unique native species. Feral goats, like those released by Captain Porter, along with pigs, burros, and cattle, were defoliating some islands. Introduced rats and feral cats, dogs, and pigs ate the eggs or young of the native birds and reptiles. While nothing was done to enforce the decree, much less to reverse the damage, and while feral animals and other problems would become worse in the future, the decree represented at least a realization, and official recognition, that there was something worth preserving in the Galapagos.

In 1959, on the one hundreth anniversary of publication of The Origin of Species, the Charles Darwin Foundation for the Galapagos Islands was incorporated in Belgium. It began operations in the islands in 1960 and inaugurated the Charles Darwin Research Station in 1964. With that, some of the damage began to be reversed. In 1965, the research station began a program of collecting tortoise eggs and bringing them to the research station where they would be hatched and raised to an age where they had a reasonable chance for survival. They were then returned to their native islands. This occurred just in time to save the Espanola race of tortoises from extinction (only 11 females and 2 males remained of the Espanola race). Declines in the populations of other races were reversed. Later, a similar program was initiated for land iguanas. The Hawaiian Petrel was also close to extinction. Its breeding sites were protected and the population is increasing. Also in 1959, the the Galapagos were declared a National Park by the government of Ecuador. It was not until 1968, however, that the boundaries of the park, which include 95% of the land in the islands, and a park service were established. Later, the ocean surrounding the islands was declared a Marine Reserve and placed under the park's jurisdiction as well. Goats were eradicated from several islands. Organized tourism began in 1970, when 1000 tourists visited the islands. Tourism has grown to an estimated 60,000 visitors annually in the 1990's. The impact of this on the islands has been kept to a minimum by implimentation of very tight controls and regulation of tour operators. Tourists eat and sleep on tour boats and are allowed to come ashore only in designated areas, and then only under the supervision of licensed guides.

Many problems remain in the Galapagos, however. The number of Ecuadorians living in the islands is increasing dramatically and straining scare resources. Many of these new "Galapagueños" fail to appreciate the delicate and unique nature of the Galapagos ecology and are demanding, sometimes violently, the right to exploit it. Fishing activities, particularly sea cumumber fishing around Fernandina, threatens marine biota directly and the terrestrial biota indirectly through introduction of foriegn species to this largely pristine island. The Ecuadorian government lacks the resources, and often the political will, necessary to protect the islands from harmful activities. The worst problem, however, remains that of feral animals. Dogs, cats, and rats are threatening marine iguanas and seabirds on many islands. Though their numbers have been reduced, tens of thousands of goats remain on Santiago. Goats on Pinta, once thought to have been eliminated, are once again ravaging that island. But the most discouraging situation is that of goats on Isabela. Goats had long been present on Isabela, but had been restricted to the southern part of the island. Sometime in the mid-1980's, a few goats crossed the barren and desolate lava flows of the Perry Isthmus and reached Volcan Alcedo. Alcedo is home to the largest population of tortoises and up until this time had been little affected by humans or feral animals. In the last 10 years, the number of goats on Alcedo has increased explosively, and there are now between 50,000 and 100,000 goats there. The once pristine caldera has been largely defoliated. Goats have also reached Volcan Darwin and perhaps number in the thousands there. Within the last few years they have also sighted on Volcan Wolf.