Galapagos Land Iguana

Thanks AntónioGinjaGinja :)
And thank you for all that information Karen! I found the number of endemic species on the islands fascinating.

Awesome portrait RachelM,great series,i like the second photo,great detail.
And Karen great info,is never to much(in our days:-) to share Darwin teories and a living prove of them :-)

Fun fact! In geological and evolutionary terms, the Galapagos Islands are quite young, probably no more than five million years old. Some of the westernmost islands are still volcanically active, and may only be hundreds of thousands of years old. The islands are famed for their vast number of endemic species and were the inspiration for Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection after he spent several weeks there during the voyage of the Beagle.

But how did life reach these barren rocky islands, almost 600 miles from the nearest landmass? There are several species of seabirds that are capable of making the flight, and the smaller species of bird probably arrived there after being blown off coarse during storms. Scientists believe reptiles made the journey on floating rafts of vegetation, and those that were able to adapt to their new habitat survived and evolved into the unique species that inhabit the islands today.

Iguanas on the mainland feed on leaves, flowers, fruit, and growing shoots of upwards of 100 different species of plant, but when those same iguanas landed on the Galapagos there would have been a scarcity of palatable vegetation for them to eat. In order to survive, some learned to swim, took to the oceans, and began to survive on a diet of seaweed algae, evolving into the marine iguanas. Others adapted to subsist the few plants that grow on the rocky land, gaining the majority of their moisture needs from the prickly-pear cactus and eating its fruit, flowers, pads, and even spines, and evolved into the Galapagos land iguanas.
https://www.facebook.com/projectnoah/pho...

Thanks Reza!

Wonderful !

Please consider adding this lovely spotting to the new Galapagos mission at : http://www.projectnoah.org/missions/1478...