Name: Diego, the Galápagos tortoise with a species-saving sex drive, retires - BBC News
Uploaded: 2020-07-02T18:30:36.000Z
Duration: 3 min 31 s
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The superlative

now take a few moments, toe pause and look away from the most pressing stories of the day and reflect on a tortoise called Diego.

Present continuous

His libido has saved his species from extinction, no less, and he's retiring.

And scientists estimate that he's fathered upto 900 giant tortoises, which were all alive today.

For decades he's being kept in captivity on Santa Cruz Island as part of a breeding program.

Before that, he was in a zoo in San Diego.

Now, though, Diego is being returned to where he started off on a tiny, uninhabited island called Espanola, from which he was taken in the 19 twenties.

Well, Emma Ridley works as a marine biologist in the Galapagos Islands.

She's with us now from Santa Cruz and ever.

Yes, I've been living and working in Galapagos for 25 years as a naturalist guide on taking groups, so visitors to the installations where they have the captive breeding program we got to see him pretty much every week for four years.

What kind of life can he expect on this new island?

Well, he had a pretty He was pretty pampered where he waas females, lots of food and years.

Do you know, did a great job on his new island?

There's plenty of food there, for the tourist is the environment.

Isn't that different to the one where he wasn't his pen.

So I'm sure he managed to settle in very rapidly and in terms of his role in avoiding extinction for his species.

And, um, I over playing in saying that he was central to avoiding that it was a very important tortoise there where the population was almost driven to extinction.

There were 12 females to males from the island and then Georgia.

And then Diego came along and he fathered probably about 40% on his own of all the young daughters hatchlings that were brought back to Espanola.

Now, of course, I'm gonna wish him a very long retirement.

How long would we expect Diego to live for?

Well, they estimate that he's about 100 years old now.

It's hard to know exactly how long giant tortoises can live, but scientists think it can be up to 150 years, maybe a little more, so he should be around there for quite a bit longer.

And just while I've got you, I'm I'm curious to know more broadly how things are on the Galapagos Islands.

It's Ah ah, popular place for people to visit, and presumably that's being hit by the Corona virus.

Yes, the Galapagos has been hit very, very hard.

About over 70% of our of our income comes from tourism.

So the fact that it just went from 100 to 0 her in pretty much one day in mid March has hit the population very, very hard.

And is there a prospect that you will not go back to normal, but it will lift from zero at some point soon?

Well, the National Park is actually opening back up to tourism in July.

However, whether people will actually want to travel or be ready to travel is a whole different question, so hopefully gradually it will start to recover, but we don't think it's gonna be any time soon.

It's ever really live with us from Santa Cruz in the Galapagos Islands.