IN SCIENCE 9 WE
Wen’t through an ecology booklit and watched a carbon documentry called Carbon 20. We looked into a few different elements and looked at carbon cycles, and stuff like food webs, trees, pyramids. We walked around Blakeburn lagoon, and documented what we saw there. We also created a powerpoint based off of an invasive species of our choice. This is my presentation, and eachs slides respective, messy but readable script.
The Galapagos Pink Land Iguana is a reptile, it is of the iguana species and through evolution has developed pink scales. Iguanas are what’s known as an ecosystem engineer, ecosystem engineers develop and evolve their ecosystem to help their survival, and survival of other species. Ecosystem engineers can also create a lot of biodiversity and maintain plant life. The way the Pink Land Iguanas are ecosystem engineers is by spreading the seeds of the plants they eat using methods like seeds getting stuck on scales, seeds falling out of mouth, or waste having intact seeds. Other examples of ecosystem engineers are beavers, knocking down trees, and building dams / homes with said wood. Now let’s see what habitat they’ve created-
The pink land iguanas are located on Isabela island, it is home to the wolf volcano (more on that later) and lots of diverse plant life. Some of which include White mangrove, Lava cactus, prickly pear, lantana, and Scalesia. Other native species of the island include Galapagos land iguana, Flightless cormorant, Blue-footed booby, Galapagos penguin, Hoary bat, Lava heron, and more. It also includes some invasive species like feral domestic cats and black rats. Now onto what endangers it-
The pink land iguana is endangered, due to Galapagos being hot it receives periodic droughts, and the wolf volcano is also prone to eruptions. The feral cats and black rats eat the eggs, and the cats even eat the young sometimes. The reason these invasive species are here is because of colonization. These animals were brought to Galapagos by European travellers and pose a large threat to the pink land iguanas’ survival. What about ways to protect it you may ask; well, this is what I’ve found-
The Galapagos national park has been gathering eggs and bringing them to research centres. After the pink land iguanas’ hatches and grows up they release them back into the wild. Now if you ask me that’s a pretty good strategy, but I have an even better one, and with that onto the next slide-
My ideas of how to protect it-
Hear me out-
TERMINATION. So technically the feral cats and black rats are an invasive species, since they were brought by travellers. So why don’t we just exterminate them all, black rats are already pretty much everywhere on earth, and I bet some of you even have cats in your house, and yes technically the feral cats are just domestic cats without human contact for a couple hundred years. Some ways we could do this are setting up rat traps in tight spaces they would hide in, safely maintaining fires in areas of high cat population or high rat population, and maybe even gathering up the animals in groups and shipping them off the island. BUT I SAY LET THEM BURN! Now-
Danke Für Hören, Thanks for listening, this was Duncan Smith on the galapagos pink land iguana.
I think i could have done the overall organiztion of my notes better, I stumbled on a few words, and had some grammer errors. I also think I could of added a bit more, but I did’nt wanna add too much cause we had to fit it in a 5 minute timeframe.