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Feb

16

2007
 
 

Shell shock



Giant tortoises do it for funMolecular monitoring of Galápagos tortoises reveals unexpected interloper The near forty-year plan to restock the Galápagos island of Española with its missing giant tortoises recently suffered a heart-in-the-mouth moment, according to a report published this week. A group of scientists, led by the University of Brussels’ Michael Milinkovitch, studied the DNA of free-ranging captive-bred tortoises to find out how inbred they are (and they are, badly). But the real surprise was the discovery of an individual -- tortoise E1465 -- whose molecular fingerprint suggests its origins lay outside the controlled breeding program. The hunt is now on to track down the interloper and any of its relatives before they “contaminate” the island’s indigenous gene pool. Milinkovitch and colleagues suggest that E1465’s father, or even its grandfather, were brought over by whalers from the nearby island of Pinzón in the 17th -- 19th centuries. Source: Milinkovitch MC, Monteyne D, Russello M, Gibbs JP, Snell HL, Tapia W, Marquez C, Caccone A & Powell JR (2007) Giant Galápagos tortoises: molecular genetic analyses identify a trans-island hybrid in a repatriation program of an endangered taxon. BMC Ecology DOI: 10.1186/1472-6785-7-2 Image © Gary Unwin

Filed Under Endangered species, Monitoring, Restoration | 2 Comments

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