German convicted of smuggling iguanas
2013-01-07 19:05
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Quito - A court in Ecuador has convicted a German tourist
of trying to smuggle four threatened iguanas out of the Galapagos Islands in
his luggage, authorities said on Sunday.
Dirk Bender was convicted “of having altered the local
ecosystem of the archipelago”, park authorities said.
The Galapagos National Park has requested the maximum
four-year jail term for Bender, who should be sentenced in the coming days.
Bender was arrested at the airport on Baltra Island on 8
July after park officials noticed him carrying a suspicious package, which was
found to contain four lizards wrapped in canvas.
The hidden reptiles were Galapagos Land Iguanas
(conolophus subcristatus), which the International Union for Conservation of
Nature ranks as "vulnerable" on its Red List of Threatened Species.
In 1976, wild dogs wiped out a colony of around 500 of
the iguanas on the island of Santa Cruz. The national park rescued around 60
survivors and launched a captive breeding program to try to revive the species.
The yellowish lizards can grow to be over a metre-long,
with males weighing up to 13kg.
The iguanas have been seen to raise themselves off the
ground to allow finches to eat ticks off their bellies - the same Galapagos
finches that inspired Charles Darwin when he visited the islands in the 19th
century.
The Galapagos Islands, situated about 1 000km off
Ecuador's coast, gained fame when Darwin visited in 1835 to conduct research
that led to his revolutionary theories on evolution.
The archipelago has been a Unesco World Heritage Site
since 1978 for the rich plant and animal life found both on land and in the
surrounding sea.
