Book Review: The Last Tortoise: A Tale of Extinction in Our Lifetime

Reptiles as a whole might not have the best public relations with many people, but there's one group that is almost universally loved - turtles.  Maybe it's because they are slow and seemingly harmless that we let our guards down around them.  Among the most popular reptiles in zoos and aquariums are the giant tortoises, especially the Galapagos tortoise.

Since Charles Darwin rode (very slowly) across the islands on the backs on these behemoths, they've been staples of zoos around the world, one of the few Galapagos animals to be seen outside of the islands.  The story of these shelled giants is a complicated, often tragic one - long before anyone was exporting to zoos, tortoises had a much more... utilitarian function in the eyes of many people, serving as a source of fresh food for whalers and other visitors to the islands.  There numbers were decimated not just through hunting (if you can even really call that "hunting"), but the introduction of invasive species and loss of habitat.  Scientifically, conserving the tortoises has been a challenge because of the confusion over their island range.  Does each island represent a different species?  A different subspecies?  What are the implications of moving tortoises between islands.

The Last Tortoise: A Tale of Extinction in Our Lifetime, is Craig Stanford's exploration of the giant tortoises of the Galapagos and around the world.  Dr. Stanford is a professor at the University of Southern California who normally studies primates, though tortoises benefit greatly in this book from his services as a biographer.  The relatively short book covers a broad range of tortoise topics, such as the evolution and distribution of the family, their complicated history with humanity, and how we can work to save them in their natural range.  The author rights with strong prose, almost indignant at the fact that we, as a society, are failing these unique creatures on so many fronts and allowing so many of them to sink into extinction.

The Galapagos tortoises take center stage in the book, and among the places that Dr. Stanford take his readers one of the most memorable would be the breeding centers of the Galapagos Islands, where tortoises are reared in captivity for release back into the wild.  It's always nice to see about how conservation breeding programs can be used to bolster a species and restore numbers.  Stanford makes it clear, however, that breeding programs are valuable to conservation with the understanding that they will, at some point, put tortoises back into the wild.  The alternative, he warns, is a world in which tortoises "hang on only in zoos and in the hands of wealthy private collectors.  They will no longer be a spices in the evolutionary sense.  They will just a scattered gene pool, a few protected, priceless animals locked up in cages."  

I wouldn't go that far as to downplay the importance of maintaining a backup colony of endangered animals for safety's sake - but I would agree at a world without wild tortoises in it would be a sadder one, and a Galapagos without its tortoises would be no Galapagos at all.

The Last Tortoise: A Tale of Extinction in Our Lifeime at Amazon.com