Here be dragons
MANY OF THE stark, black basaltic lava shorelines of the Galápagos Islands bristle with hundreds, if not thousands, of equally dark, metre-long lizards. They’re marine iguanas and, with their bodies often intertwined and overlapping, they lie immobile for hours on end, stirring only to reorient themselves according to the intensity of the sun’s rays.
Without moving position they occasionally spurt out a sneeze-like spray of concentrated salt water from their round, scaly nostrils. This briny mist settles and dries in a whitish crust on surrounding surfaces, both scaly skin and corrugated lava rock.
Come low tide, a slow wave of movement spreads among the prone bodies as each animal extricates itself from the pile and begins making its way towards the crashing waves nearby. One by one they resolutely slip from sun-warmed shore into frigid sea in search of their favourite seaweed pastures.
Suddenly animated, the smaller ones feed hungrily on jutting boulders along the wave-washed foreshore, scraping the short crop of glistening green and red algae with specialised, rasp-like teeth. Larger individuals ignore the semi-exposed rocks, and switch from crawling to swimming by launching themselves into the water and
