PUERTO AYORA (Ecuador): Industrial fishing boats hover menacingly on the edges of Ecuador’s Galapagos Marine Reserve, where schools of multicoloured fish and hammerhead sharks frolic in the protected Pacific waters.

The reserve is a haven for the flurry of creatures and plants living in the waters around the Galapagos Islands where naturalist Charles Darwin found the inspiration for his theory of natural selection. But outside its boundaries, not delineated by any physical barrier, there is no protection on the high seas where these same species also venture.

The sharks, turtles, iguanas, sea lions and fish that thrive in the Galapagos “don’t understand political boundaries,” Stuart Banks, a senior marine scientist at the Charles Darwin Foundation, said on board Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise research vessel.

“So they’re going to be moving between different territories and that’s when they’re most at risk, particularly to things like industrial fishing and bycatch.” The solution, according to Greenpeace, is to secure a much larger area of ocean by creating the first-ever marine protected area on the high seas bordering the Galapagos Marine Reserve.

But for this to happen, at least 60 countries must ratify the High Seas Treaty adopted by United Nations member states last June. Only two have done so to date.

Like a jigsaw puzzle

This news agency accompanied an Arctic Sunrise scientific mission to the area this month to investigate the threats posed to the Galapagos Marine Reserve, which Greenpeace describes as “probably the best conservation project carried out in the oceans.” The reserve of nearly 200,000 square kilometres is one of the world’s largest and most biodiverse with more than 3,000 species, many of them found nowhere else.

Biologist Paola Sangolqui explained she was testing water samples to analyse “which marine species have been in this area and have left some kind of DNA trace.” For his part, Daniel Armijos was in charge of underwater video monitoring of fish numbers and prevalence.

“It is kind of like putting together a big jigsaw puzzle because everything is integrated in some way,” explained Banks. “And if you’re looking to prioritise the most important regions to start working, to know where those corridors are (along which species migrate), you need to use genetics so you can start to look at how particular populations are connected from one region to another.”

Hammerhead haven

From the Arctic Sunrise, scientists also descended a robot to explore the coral reefs that serve as key feeding and breeding grounds for many fish, said expedition leader Sophie Cooke, for whom “the abundance of marine life in this national park is simply staggering.” Marine reserve employee Eduardo Espinoza, in charge of day-to-day monitoring, said the archipelago is a rare sanctuary for hammerhead sharks, whose fins are a delicacy in some Asian countries.

Hammerheads were at particular risk of “overfishing and illegal fishing,” Espinoza said as he fixed an identifying label to a young specimen. “In the Galapagos, hammerhead sharks are always abundant. They have a refuge here to reproduce, from where they move throughout the Pacific,” he added.

Published in Dawn, March 17th, 2024