{"id":21452,"date":"2012-07-10T17:37:16","date_gmt":"2012-07-10T14:37:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/?p=21452"},"modified":"2019-03-30T17:44:54","modified_gmt":"2019-03-30T17:44:54","slug":"galapagos-islands-animal-smuggling-german-tourist-caught-stealing-endangered-iguanas-21452","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/galapagos-islands-animal-smuggling-german-tourist-caught-stealing-endangered-iguanas-21452\/","title":{"rendered":"Galapagos Islands Animal smuggling : German Tourist caught stealing endangered iguanas"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_21480\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-21480\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-21480\" title=\"Galapagos Islands Iguanas faced extinction late in the 20th century\" src=\"http:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/galapagos-islands-iguanas-nationalturk-0455-e1341930951372.jpg\" alt=\"Galapagos Islands Iguanas faced extinction late in the 20th century\" width=\"610\" height=\"334\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-21480\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Galapagos Islands Iguanas faced extinction late in the 20th century, now 4 of them nearly fell victim to a German smuggler<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<h1>Caught stealing ! German tourist arrested for stealing rare iguanas from Galapagos Islands in Ecuador.<\/h1>\n<p>Galapagos Islands \/ NationalTurk &#8211; A German tourist has been detained by Galapagos police for allegedly trying to smuggle four endangered iguanas out of the Galapagos Islands, Galapagos National Park informed.<\/p>\n<p>The Galapagos National Park rangers reported they had intercepted the runaway man on Monday at the Guayaguil International airport close to the amazing archipelago after he was seen carrying a suspicious package, which was found to contain four iguana lizards wrapped in canvas.<\/p>\n<p>The smuggled reptiles appear to be Galapagos Land Iguanas (conolophus subcristatus), an endangered species. The yellowish lizards can grow to be over a meter (three feet) long, with males weighing up to 13 kilograms (30 pounds).<\/p>\n<h2>Galapagos Islands Iguanas faced extinction late in the 20th century<\/h2>\n<p>The iguanas have been seen to raise themselves off the ground to allow finches to eat ticks off their bellies &#8212; the same Galapagos finches that inspired Charles Darwin when he visited the islands in the 19th century.<\/p>\n<p>In 1976 wild dogs wiped out a colony of around 500 of the iguanas on the island of Santa Cruz. The Galapagos Islands national park rescued around 60 survivors and launched a captive breeding program to try to revive the species.<\/p>\n<p>The Galapagos Islands, situated about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) off Ecuador&#8217;s coast, gained fame when Darwin visited in 1835 to conduct research that led to his revolutionary theories on evolution.<\/p>\n<p>Ecuador annexed the Galapagos Islands in 1831, and named them the Archipelago of Ecuador. A year later a group of convicts were shipped in to populate the island of Floreana; Spanish name Isla Santa Maria.<\/p>\n<p>The Galapagos Islands first appeared on maps in the late 16th century, and were named &#8220;Insulae de los Galopegos&#8221; (Islands of the Tortoises) in reference to the giant tortoises found there.<\/p>\n<h3>Galapagos Islands : Unesco World Heritage site sice 1978<\/h3>\n<p>The Galapagos 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 and on the coral life underwater.<\/p>\n<p>The German man arrested on Monday faces a jail sentence of up to 3 years if convicted of the iguana smuggling charges.<\/p>\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; color: #f00;\">Error, group does not exist! Check your syntax! (ID: 10)<\/span>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Caught stealing ! German arrested for stealing rare iguanas from Galapagos Islands in Ecuador.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":562,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,80,63,1,118,34,117,14],"tags":[27777,27772,27778,27779,330,27774,27771,27770,27780,27775,25845,15122,27773,78464,27776],"class_list":["post-21452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america","category-breaking-news","category-daily","category-general","category-hot","category-latin-america","category-travel","category-world","tag-archipelago","tag-caught-stealing","tag-charles-darwin","tag-charles-darwin-galapagos-islands","tag-ecuador","tag-ecuador-galapagos-islands","tag-galapagos-iguanas","tag-galapagos-islands","tag-galapagos-islands-iguanas","tag-galapagos-islands-unesco-world-heritage-site","tag-galapagos-national-park","tag-german-tourist","tag-iguana-smuggling","tag-tropical-islands","tag-unesco-world-heritage-site"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/562"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21452\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}