Dr. Evelyn Jensen

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25 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 1 Mar

Dr. Evelyn Jensen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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This really is the start of a new species.

So as an evolutionary biologist, this is very exciting because here we are repopulating the island and it's really a new start.

The Floriana tortoise went extinct around 1840.

But in the early 2000s, it was discovered that there was a living population of hybrids on one of the other islands.

And so those hybrids were brought into captivity.

And their offspring are not the same species, but they have ancestry to the original extinct species.

And so the hope is that they will have the best chance of survival and doing well on Floriana Island.

Tortoises are hugely important, especially in the Galapagos.

They're the only large-bodied herbivore that's native to the environment.

And so they really are the ecosystem engineers doing the grazing, the seed dispersal, the trampling.

and basically making habitat for all of the other species.

Well I mean they've spent years preparing the island for this so there's been huge campaigns to try and

reduce or eliminate some of the key invasive species.

And then of course, for almost 15 years now, they've been captive breeding to get this population of juvenile tortoises.

We are expecting huge shifts in the structure of the whole community, and nobody's really sure how it's going to play out.

But it can only be a good thing.

The Galapagos Islands have suffered from lots of invasive species.

And having the native ecosystem engineers back there should help restore balance and move the environment back towards a more natural state.

The hope is that over the coming decades, other species will have their populations increase as Floriana becomes more like it used to be.

So they have GPS trackers on them so they can look and see their movements and where they're going.

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