Thread by @gauravsabnis

In #Galapagos, you experience surreal things like a penguin at equatorial mangroves just swimming by your boat.

These mangroves were so strangely low on biodiversity cos of their young age & remote location. Almost like a Dubai recreation of mangroves lol.

No no, they were not artificially created.

But they are very young and out in the ocean, and so if you've been to continental mangroves like Sunderbans or Everglades, they *feel* a bit artificial.

And that's more evidence for evolution.

https://twitter.com/happiestKali/status/1659579360083431427?s=19

So compared to the mangroves in Florida or Trinidad that I've visited, I noticed that the Galapagos mangroves had way fewer creatures & species. No tree snakes or water snakes. Very few bugs. The water was a lot clearer, not muddy. All explained by geology & biology.

Galapagos isles are just 5-10 million years old. All life there has had to come from the outside and then evolve in that remote ecosystem. At the rate of one new species every 10K years or so.

Many things we take for granted on continents are just absent here!

Pretty flowers!

There are no big pretty flowers anywhere in the wild on the Galapagos. Only in human settlements, and there too, imported & cultivated.

But plants with big pretty colorful flowers are just entirely absent on an archipelago with 15 kinds of giant Tortoises.

The explanation for this shows the beautiful internal logic of evolution.

Big pretty flowers, with their sweet pollen, exist to attract pollinators insects. Or hummingbirds. And you need a pollinator to reproduce. Even for one generation.

For big flower plants to exist here, there would have to be that one original plant that somehow made it floating from the continent 1000 km away AND with pollinator bees or hummingbirds still alive.

Extremely unlikely. And even then, they have to survive dry Galapagos.

Also, even though hummingbirds will travel thousands of miles from Colombia to California, they are only able to do so with access to land at regular intervals to refuel. Being a hummingbird is a high energy endeavor.

1000 km of Ocean, no flowers, is hard to survive.

That's why hummingbirds, so common in the central and south American continent closest to the Galapagos, do not really exist in the wild in Galapagos.