It’s night aboard the Santa Cruz II and the Pacific Ocean thrashes with endemic Galápagos sharks. Using our ship’s lights, we watch the creatures below hunt flying fish with quicksilver agility, some of the hapless prey crashing into our vessel’s hull, around which sea lions wait for an easy meal. A huge green turtle pops up unawares amid the melee, before swiftly returning to the depths. Such is the Galápagos’s scintillating theatre.
The Galápagos Islands (a national park since 1959) can thank large upwellings of cold currents for their staggering marine biodiversity; water that ushers in a rich soup of nutrients, helping to support a food web that contains abundant marine and terrestrial wildlife — alarge proportion of which is found nowhere else on Earth. It was this uniqueness that the British naturalist Charles Darwin observed soon after stepping ashore on San Cristóbal Island in 1859, setting him on a path to publishing On the Origin of Species, which outlined his groundbreaking theories on evolution.
Fast forward to 2020, and some of those charismatic creatures — including the sharks I encounter under our ship — are being netted by a huge Chinese fishing fleet not far outside the Galápagos Marine Reserve (GMR), a 53,000sq mile protected marine habitat created in 1998.
