Exciting finding: earthworms in caves!

For our final day in Galápagos, we wanted to visit “Los túneles” in El Chato. El Chato is a protected area where the giant Galapagos tortoises roam freely. The reserve is also a great place for bird watching in the Galapagos. In El Chato, there are extensive lava tunnels (tubes) where visitors can explore underground in illuminated passages. We were curious to see if we could find any earthworms inside them. After a brief tour where we learned more about the giant tortoises and saw them in action, we entered the tunnels and searched for earthworms with some skepticism. But, to our surprise and delight, we found some!! Of course, Pontoscolex was there. Is there anything this earthworm can’t do? But apart from Pontoscolex, we found some very small worms that we couldn’t identify at first glance. So we collected some of them and hopefully with morphological analyses and barcoding we can figure out the species. This was a very exciting way of ending our expedition since it raised a lot of questions about how they were surviving in the tunnels and what kind of molecular adaptations they needed to live there. We would love to continue the investigation on that! To celebrate our success and to say goodbye to Jaime’s family, we went out for dinner to a local place in Puerto Ayora. There, we savored some fish (robalo) and shrimps (camarón) and rice with beans accompanied by juice (jugo) and once more, Portuguese wine brought by Luis.