Travel Trivia: How are "foreign" or non-indigenous species introduced to the Galapagos? The easy answer is by humans, but popular believe is that the old pirate/privateers brought life stock on board for food, and exchanged those for tortoises, leaving pigs and goats and such behind. Rats always traveled on boats, so simply bringing anything from ship to land transfers rats. And these animals have learned to live with humans - if you can survive that, you can survive anything. And so they did.

Nature is a very delegate balance. Many years ago, humans came to the Galapagos and that act in and of itself upset the balance. Now they are fighting to restore it. Take goats for example. They eat anything they come across. They also adapt their diets to fit the environment. The Galapagos, for example, are dry islands. Goats here learned to drink salt water to survive. And since they survived, they have multiplied, they fairly easily have been transferred between islands, and they are forming a true pandemic to the Galapagos exactly because they eat everything in their reach, leaving nothing for, for example, the tortoises and iguanas.

The island of Santiago is the 3rd largest in the archipelago and had an estimated 20,000 goats. How does one get rid of 20,000 goats? You shoot them.

Goats are social animals, they hang like homies. So they picked a few hundred goats and tagged them with a GPS device. Called them Judas Goats (folks, I'm not making this up). They then tracked down the goat in the wild and shot every goat around it, just not the Judas goat. As it found a new group, to repeated the shooting part of the process. It was a clever way to quickly find most goats, and in 2 months the island of Santiago shed 20,000 goats.

Santiago was a walk like you'd picture a jungle walk in Indiana Jones-style. Narrow paths, ups and downs, cliffs to your left and walls to your right. And walking through and underneath the mangroves makes it extra adventurous. A great 1hr hike at Espumilla Beach before breakfast.

After breakfast we went snorkeling in Bucaneer's Cove. Visibility was great, but water was cold. Still, we had fun on the dive and again played with sea lions who swam with us. I don't care how often we see that, it just doesn't get old.

Relaxed after lunch with a sunset hike of Puerto Egas. There is an old house there where someone lived for 11 years, with no access to electricity, water, food or any modern conveniences. He just lived off the land, and he did it alone. Than the government removed him from the island. One of our guides had the opportunity to visit the island with him, and we got a lot of inside stories from that.

At sunset, the blue-footed boobies came out in full force. They were hunting. The way they hunt is in a flock that circles around fish in the surf near the shore, and then they collectively dive straight down like kamikaze pilots and pick the little fish right up. It's a fascinating sight we watch for a good 15min before going back on board.

Back to Santa Cruz, where I stayed for a week to dive at the beginning of the trip. It'll be a full day today on the island, 7:30 to 6:00.