Galapagos

Plants

Surprisingly, the plan life of the Galapagos is rather desert-like. The reason for that is that the Galapagos islands is located on the Pacific Dry Belt. It is also hard to classify the plants living there because the Galapagos is still relatively new and in the middle of evolution. Because of that it is hard to relate there to plants everywhere. For that reason I don’t have a list that tells you the exact plants, but I can tell you this. These are the different ones we have counted are 552 plus 614 vascular plant that are native. There are also about 825 species of plants that were introduced into the Galapagos. More than one hundred of them have became plentiful in the wild. But they are invasive and also the major concern. Three of the most invasive plants have been eradicated. That is surprising, the mainland, Ecuador, has more than 20,000 species of plants. It has a reason though. There’s a saltwater barrier between them. If any seeds fall into the salty water it'll probably kill them. It is also very hard to root down in such a harsh environment. In fact 30% of the plants aren’t found anywhere else!

 

There are three major categories for the plants of the Galapagos, The Coastal Zone, the Arid Zone, and the Highlands. The Coastal Zones live near to the water and thus are OK to salt from the sea. One of such is the mangrove, which is an important breeding ground to the Pelicans, Frigate Birds, and some others. They also provide shade for lizards and sea lions as well as protection for turtles.

 

The Arid Zone is further in, and highly adapted. It has a extreme drought - like terrain. There is abundance in succulent cacti and leafless shrubs. The leafless shrub flowers and grows leaves in the rainy season. The rainy season is very short (same with this sentence, although with this message in parenthesis, not anymore).                                                                                       

However, above the arid zone, in the highlands, it rains a lot more often and is extremely green. Not all the islands have this zone, only the ones that reach highest elevation. A tree that is commonly found there is the "dandelion" tree, also known as the Scalesia tree.

 

 

It has evolved, with no competition, into a tree from its ancestor, the dandelion, or of something of its family. It is home to mosses, liverwort, and epiphytes. They are non-parasitic, and the trees don't mind them. They only use the trees for support. You can see more in Evolution/Adaptation. And that concludes the Plants of Galapagos.