Diego, the giant tortoise that saved his species, goes home
Environment — di Lorenzo Brenna
After spending decades in captivity to contribute to a crucial repopulation programme, Diego has returned to Española, in the Galápagos.
Diego, the giant tortoise that saved his species, goes home
After spending decades in captivity to contribute to a crucial repopulation programme, Diego has returned to Española, in the Galápagos.
Populations of the Española giant tortoise (Chelonoidis hoodensis), a subspecies endemic to the island of the same name in the Galápagos, Ecuador, underwent a drastic decline around the mid-nineteenth century, decimated by sailors who took the reptiles aboard to use as a food supply during voyages. By the 1960s, from an original population estimated at 2,400 individuals, barely 14 tortoises survived, only two of them male.
To protect this subspecies, listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List, all surviving individuals were captured and taken to a dedicated centre on the island of Santa Cruz to launch a breeding programme. In 1976 a third male, held at San Diego Zoo, joined the programme. It is precisely this tortoise, named Diego, that proved particularly active and made a decisive contribution to the recovery of his species.
A conservation success story
Diego has indeed fathered around 40–45 per cent of the more than two thousand Chelonoidis hoodensis born in the captive breeding programme. After goats — an invasive species threatening the island's vegetation — were eradicated from Española around the 1980s, the reintroduction of the tortoises to their original habitat began. Today the population numbers more than 2,500 individuals, testament to the effectiveness of the ex situ conservation project.
Return to the wild
Diego has recently joined those tortoises: after decades in captivity, he was reintroduced, along with 14 other tortoises, to his native island. Paulo Proaño Andrade, Ecuador's Minister of the Environment, celebrated the reintroduction of the tortoises with a tweet, highlighting the success of the breeding programme in "saving their species from extinction".
100 years away from home
Officials at the Galápagos national park believe Diego is over a century old and that he was taken from the island of Española in the early twentieth century by a scientific expedition. After more than one hundred years away, Diego — who, along with the other tortoises, underwent a quarantine period to prevent them from carrying seeds of plants not native to the island — will be able to end his days at "home", where far more tortoises await him than when he left.