My Year of Darwin 5/15/2014: Not easy being a tortoise in the Galapagos

  

"The inhabitants, although much complaining of poverty, obtain, without much trouble, the means of subsistence. In the woods there are many wild pigs and goats; but the staple article of animal food is supplied by the tortoises. Their numbers have of course been greatly reduced in this island, but the people yet count on two days' hunting giving them food for the rest of the week. It is said that formerly single vessels have taken away as many as seven hundred, and that the ship's company of a frigate some years since brought down in one day two hundred tortoises to the beach." Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle 

Galapagos Tortoise at the Philadelphia Zoo