The story began in 1990, when one young Princeton University Ph. D. student decided to do his dissertation on flightless cormorants. Was he from the United States? Or from any little European country? No, Carlitos Valle is a native of the Galapagos Islands. He was born and raised in Puerto Ayora, the largest Galapagos town, on Santa Cruz Island. He spent his childhood surrounded by unique creatures, and when he got old enough to go to university, he moved to Quito to study biology at the Catholic University of Ecuador. Later on he got his master's and Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Princeton University, a University very much involved in Galapagos research. (Peter and Rosemary Grant, who have done pioneering work on Darwin's finches, work at Princeton).
Carlos Valle spent several months per year over a four-year period camping at the northeastern corner of Fernandina Island. He was intrigued by the poliandric behavior of flightless cormorants, and by the fact that females desert the nests too soon. They leave their mates behind, so the males become the only chicks' caretakers.
Carlos wanted to find the answers for two important questions: What sort of ecological factor allows one parent to abandon the nest, and why only the female does it. He proposed several interesting hypotheses, and finally found out that Galapagos cormorants (Nannopterum harrisi) have different abilities to provide the young with food. The male is 37% larger than the female, dives deeper, and catches bigger fish. In other words, with that kind of father, who needs a mother?
Female cormorants specialize in smaller fish, to reduce competition with the males. It is a very good arrangement; they help for the first couple of months, then abandon the chicks and find new mates. The females are the ones that do all the courting; they even fight for the male they like!
Carlos discovered it all by observing, sampling and following his 96 cormorants in the research area. There are approximately 1,000 flightless cormorants in Galapagos (and in the world); therefore 96 individuals represent 10% of the world's population, a very representative sample.
Carlos Valle came back to Fernandina today, for the first time in 6 years. He went back to the camping site, and he remembered the old and nice times living at the largest pristine island in Galapagos. He was very excited to find 3 of his 96 banded birds (one of those is in the picture).
He misses doing research, but now he has a much more important commitment: to work in conservation. In recent years he has focused on the Galapagos special law, the Galapagos Marine Reserve and the control and eradication of exotic organisms.
Carlos Valle is the coordinator for World Wildlife Fund's Galapagos program, and our guest lecturer on board the Polaris this week.
