The Galapagos Islands, off the west coast of Ecuador, are a treasure trove of unique ecological specimens.
The iguana, for instance, is a land-dwelling reptile.
But the star attraction are the giant tortoises, with their hulking grey shells and enormous lifespan.
They are one of the best known inhabitants of the Galapagos.
The Galapagos giant tortoise.
Even Charles Darwin thought the meat was very good and that young tortoises make excellent soup.
The biggest invaders of them all was goats.
As goats stripped the islands bare, the tortoises began to disappear.
It was understood that an aggressive approach was needed.
It was one of the mostcutting-edge eradication programof the time.
Within a few years, 90 percent of the goats were eradicated with relative ease.
But as goats became rarer and rarer, they became harder to detect.
The remaining ten percent became increasingly difficult to remove.
To achieve total eradication, the hunters employed something called the Judas goat.
Remains of tortoises killed by hunters on Galapagos Islands, circa 1903.
Taking their meat away would have removed these nutrients from the island forever.
Better to let the bodies decompose into the soil.
A handful of goats, however, were consumed by the eradication team.
By 2006, they were the only goats that remained on the target islands.
These were allowed to live on the islands for monitoring purposes.
After the Galapagos was rid of the goats, the vegetation underwent an amazing recovery.
Small trees began regenerating from the stumps left by the goats.
Highland shrub species, forest tree seedlings, Opuntia cactus, and other endemic species increased in number.
Project Isabela was the world’s largest island restoration effort to date.
The last few hundreds were the hardest and the most expensive to remove.
The success of Project Isabela led conservationists to launch goat eradication program on three more islands.
