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EveryFish

Reef or sea, Ecuador

The Galapagos Islands

Volcanic islands on the equator in the Pacific, where cold and warm currents meet and hammerheads school by the hundred.

The Galapagos Islands lie about 1,000 km off Ecuador, where warm tropical water meets cold currents rising from the deep. The mix brings together tropical reef fish, cold-water species and open-ocean visitors, and dozens of the islands' fish species are found nowhere else. The Galapagos Marine Reserve was created in 1998 and later enlarged.

Hammerheads at Darwin and Wolf

The remote northern islands of Darwin and Wolf are known for schools of hundreds of scalloped hammerheads, as well as Galapagos sharks, silky sharks and, in some months, large female whale sharks. Ecuador made the waters around these islands a no-take sanctuary in 2016. On the sea floor live odd fish such as the red-lipped batfish, which walks on its fins.

Fishing and the reserve

Small-scale fishers from the islands fish for groupers, lobster and sea cucumbers inside the reserve under zoning rules. Industrial fleets, especially large squid fleets, fish just outside the reserve's edge, and their numbers have drawn international attention. In 2022 Ecuador added the Hermandad Marine Reserve, linking the Galapagos towards Costa Rica's Cocos Island as a corridor for migrating sharks and turtles.

Fish of The Galapagos Islands

Whale sharkLarge females visit the northern islands

Still to be written: Scalloped hammerhead, Galapagos shark, Red-lipped batfish.

Photo credits on this page

The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.

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