February 7th, 2017

Day 315: Punta Carrion & Seymour Island

Our day started EARLY: breakfast at 6:30AM sharp, briefing on the dive site at 7:15AM and geared up and in the water by 8AM. Today was a gentle easing-in for our epic dive trip – only 2 dives today (child’s play!) at Punta Carrion: a location off the northern coast of Santa Cruz Island. Other than White-tip Reef Sharks, we didn’t see much here, but it was a nice, easy dive to get our confidence up. Tomorrow, we face the real shit at Wolf Island – eeek!

Lindsay gets over her fear of sharks really fast when we find a school of White-tipped Reef Sharks sitting on the ocean floor. While the Galápagos is FULL of sharks (particularly famous for Hammerhead and Whale Sharks), none of them pose a danger to humans. *Very rarely* someone will spot a Tiger Shark or Bull Shark (yes – those ARE dangerous) but even then, scuba divers are so odd-looking and totally outside their food chain, that aggressive behavior is not common

Seriously – if you don’t like sharks, don’t come to the Galápagos

After lunch, we had a chance to get off the boat and go ashore for a guided walk on Seymour Island – a small, uninhabited island off the north coast of Santa Cruz. This island is home to huge colonies of Frigatebirds and Blue-Footed Boobies, in addition to Balta Land Iguanas (which were introduced onto the island in the 1920s – ironically, the iguanas are extinct on Balta thanks to the ecologically irresponsible behavior of the US Army when they were stationed there during WWII). We were only supposed to spend an hour ashore – since we had a whopping 16hr navigation to get to Wolf Island by tomorrow! – but it was such a good tour, our group lingered far longer than we were supposed to. Our poor guide finally had to beg us to keep walking when another boat with G-Adventures turned up, waiting for their turn on the island.

A park ranger leads us around Seymour Island, but had no problem when the boys ignore the “STOP” signs to get a close-up of a male Frigatebird

A female Frigatebird – unlike most of the other birds on the island, these guys can’t land on water (no flipper feet) so they get their food by attacking other birds forcing them to either drop their prey or throw it up. The Frigatebirds then dive after the dropped food and make off with their stolen meal #gansta

A trio of eggs hiding in a cactus, and a male Frigatebird babysits his fluffy white chick

The male Frigatebird has a large red neck sack that he inflates to attract a mate. This poor guy seems to have given up on love L

Swallow-Tailed Gulls – these red-eyed birds have night-vision and are the only birds in the Galápagos that exclusively hunt fish at night

The ridiculous, yet beautiful, Blue-Footed Booby! It’s very hard to tell the males and females apart, but females have larger pupils – we’re guessing this one is a girl

So colorful! The bright blue feet are due to the bird’s diet on fish and are a sign of how healthy the bird is. Since the ladies only want to mate with healthy boys, the bright blue feet are also a sexually selected trait (i.e. natural selection – thanks, Darwin!)

Huge, orange land iguanas roam all over Seymour – each island within the Galápagos has a slightly different type of land iguana (like the Giant Tortoises, natural selecion caused these geographically isolated animals to evolve slightly different characteristics suited to their environment)

The smaller, plain black marine iguana – these guys look pretty much the same on all the islands

It’s not unheard of for land iguanas and marine iguanas to interbreed (despite the difference in size!) – looks like the land iguana in this picture has his eyes on a marine-cutie!