The Daisy Forests, Galapagos

I have hiked to the top of a volcano to walk through the lush cloud forests of giant daisies. I listen to the chirps of finches and insects, life abounds all around me. It is a veritable paradise, so different to the barren volcanic moonscapes found elsewhere on the island.

The giant daisy forests of the Galapagos! Isn't that just a magical notion? It just shows the incredible changes natural selection and evolution can have when an organism finds itself in an ecosystem as unique as these islands. Charles Darwin thought of the scalesias as the botanical versions of the Galapagos finches (please see the Darwin’s finches local spot) as they are found all over the Galapagos in a bewildering variety of forms, as bushes, trees, vines and shrubs. The scalesias are a prime example of ‘adaptive radiation’, a special kind of evolutionary divergence where many species rapidly branch off from a common ancestor like the spokes of a wheel, evolving in a burst of diversity, each one adapting to its own environment or niche.

A good example of this is the Scalesia affinis. At first glance, it is impossible to imagine that this small, hardy, flowering shrub has the trees looming above me as a cousin. It is tiny with tough, waxy leaves built to minimise water loss and adapted to heat and poor soils. Unlike the trees, which live in the fertile uplands, this shrub has evolved to thrive in the arid, harsh landscape of the lowlands.

Scalesia trees (Scalesia pedunculata) form the forested areas of the Galapagos. They have thin, supple trunks, grow up to 50ft (15m) tall, and are often draped with soft moss. They sit up high in the top altitudes, usually at the mid and upper parts of volcanoes. Here they form tropical cloud forests, dripping with moisture, cool and humid, creating the richest, most biodiverse habitats in all of the islands. 

It’s the small animals that are most common in these forests. In the boughs, woodpecker finches use little sticks as tools to dig insect larvae out of the trunks, a Galapagos barn owl hoots, and a small train of butterflies fly by my face. I take my camera to snap some pictures of this wonderful Eden and suddenly see a dun-brown blur of movement. Then, I feel the slightest weight on top of my camera lens. I look away from the eyepiece and see, perched on top, a Galapagos flycatcher. I’m confused at first, but then I remember, the flycatcher rarely sees its reflection in nature, and is famous for flying towards it in tourists’ cameras, mistaking it for a member of its own species. I let the flycatcher sit for a while, but as it begins to peck at my lens, I shoo it off. It's better off socialising with real flycatchers anyway.

These forests are beautiful, but they are extremely fragile. Scalesia trees grow as a cohort, meaning that they all seed and grow at the same time. They take about 10-15 years to reach maturity, so when the forest is in the early part of its life cycle, if a large number of trees are destroyed, they will not have developed seed banks yet, and the forest will be unable to regenerate. As wildfires and extreme weather events increase with climate change, these unique and beautiful forests will face great peril, and many may be forever lost.

Still, it’s a privilege to be here now. I sit on an upturned root and watch the birds play in the branches, stretching my legs out in preparation for the next stage on my journey.