QUITO – Billionaire Bill Gates, founder and former CEO of Microsoft, visited a giant tortoise breeding center on Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands.
Gates, one of the world’s richest people, toured the Center for the Reproduction and Captive Breeding of Giant Tortoises on Santa Cruz Island on Tuesday, the Galapagos National Park said.
The billionaire was accompanied by Edwin Naula, tourism administration chief at Galapagos National Park, which protects the islands’ delicate biodiversity.
More than 5,000 tortoises belonging to four different species have been born at the Santa Cruz breeding center, helping to repopulate the islands and buffer several giant tortoise families from the risk of extinction, the park said.
The Galapagos Islands are located about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) west of the coast of continental Ecuador and were declared a World Natural Heritage Site in 1978.
Some 95 percent of the territory’s 8,000 sq. kilometers (a little over 3,000 sq. miles) constitutes a protected area that is home to more than 50 species of animals and birds found nowhere else on the planet.
The islands were made famous by 19th-century British naturalist Charles Darwin, whose observations of life on the islands contributed greatly to his theory of the evolution of species. EFE |
