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In the Nigerian metropolis, motorcycle taxi drivers contend with harassment, chaotic streets and gnarly accidents, but without them, the city of twenty million would grind to a halt. This article by Alexis O Kiowo, the fabric of Lagos, Nigeria is delicately strung together. The mega city spills from the mainland onto several islands in a lagoon that brushes against the Atlantic Ocean. It covers an area of about thirteen hundred square miles, and many Lagusians navigate the sprawling landscape on

the back of a motorcycle taxi or okada. Their dare devil drivers called riders, zigzag through congested streets, dodging potholes and pedestrians. As both rider and passenger, or in some cases multiple passengers try to stay upright and unharmed. Public transportation here can be inefficient and roads can be difficult

to maneuver on foot. Okadas solve a crucial problem that the government has been unable to solve for years, says photographer and National Geographic Explorer Victor Adawale, who was born and raised in Lagos. Some see okadas as a menace. Local officials claim riders are responsible for a large portion of Lagos traffic accidents and robberies are often committed by

people on motorcycles. To improve road safety, bureaucrats have banned commercial motorcycles from bridges, highways and many other parts of the city. In twenty nineteen, the government launched the Bus Reform Initiative, which has deployed hundreds of new buses along dozens of routes across the region. That hasn't decreased the population's appetite for okada's, which are still widely used to

ferry commuters to neighborhoods that buses can't reach. Everybody you see on the streets is riding in defiance of the ban because they don't have another option. Otdawali says, Traditionally, the motorcycles have been the cheapest choice for passengers. Some rides cost the equivalent of less than a US dollar and have provided a reliable living for those who drive them in a city where wages can be hard to

come by. I am still riding because my job as a mechanic is not bringing in the income I need on time, says Aluwafemei Ipadoda, a friend of Adawali's father, who has driven okadas for over twenty years to pay for his children's education. Fares are beginning to rise as riders factor in the risk of getting caught. Enforcement of the ban is uneven, but residents still operating okada's are vulnerable and face harassment from police, who frequently arrest riders

and demand extortion payments in exchange for confiscated motorcycles. People pay as much as ninety thousand naira fifty seven dollars to get their motorcycle back. Otdawali says, Sometimes they don't get it back, sometimes they have to watch it get crushed. The government has impounded and destroyed thousands of Okada's, a devastating blow the motorcycles are expensive up to thirty three times the median annual salary in Lagos, and riders frequently

buy them in installments. Riders haven't taken the ban lying down. Numerous protests have led to clashes with police, and at least one okada union has filed a lawsuit against the government seeking both a repeal of the banded and lost wages. Odawali's option of Okada's has changed over the years. When he was a boy, his father, who rode okadas for twenty five years, use the same bike to take the family to church on the market and to drop off

Otdawali and his brother at school. His whole family rode on the back of the motorcycle, which was a marker of lower social class at the time. He felt ashamed it would get off the yokada a short distance from school so his classmates wouldn't see him, but that shame has now evolved into pride. As Otdawale has watched the writers navigate these new challenges, they refused to be erased

from the city. Next resurrecting the Lost Tortoises of the Galopagus by Hannah Nordhaus, they thrilled sailors they inspired Darwin. Then by the mid nineteenth century, the iconic Florian Floriana tortoises were gone. Here's how a group of persistent scientists unlocked the secrets to bringing them back. In October eighteen twenty, the Nantucket whaling ship Essex laid anchor at a blue green harbor on the Galapagos Island off Floriana, more than

six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador. The sailors rowed their whale boats ashore and followed paths trampled by ancient reptiles, through broken basalts and tangled thickets of salt bush and cactus. Keeping a sharp lookout, rowed cap'n Boy Thomas Nickerson for the objects of their search. They were hunting for Galopicus giant tortoises. The animals varied from island to island. Some had round domed carapaces, while others had shells that curved up at the front like Spanish riding saddles,

but all could provide food for multiple sailors. When the whalers found a small turpin, they'd flip it over, tie canvas straps to each of the creature's legs, then hoist the tortoise under their backs like a knapsap. They'd tie the largest ones, some weighing more than five hundred pounds, by their legs, to long poles, hauling them two or three men per side, across sharp and uneven lava rocks and back to their ship. There they'd stack their captives

upside down in the hold like nesting bowls. Tortoises could live up to a year without sustenance. They neither eat nor drank, nor is the least pains taken with them, wrote Owen Chase, the ship's first mate. They are strewed over the deck, thrown under foot, or packed away in the hold as suits convenience. Yessex took more than sixty of Floriana's tortoises, which had the curved shells known as saddlebacks, and were, Nicholson wrote, the most rich, flavored and delicious

meat I have ever met with. Then the ship set off for the Pacific whaling grounds, where a month later it was rammed by a whale, a disaster that provided the inspiration for Herman Malville's Moby Dick. The sailors salvaged as many tortoises from the foundering ship as they could fit on their small whale boats, eating them and eventually each other on their ill fated voyage back to the South American mainland. The other tortoises sank with a ship or floated away. Yessex was far from alone in its

plundering of Galopicus tortoises. When Charles Darwin arrived at Floriana in eighteen thirty five on the journey that would spark his theory of evolution, he heard of whaling vessel vessels taking as many as seven hundred tortoises on one visit. Their numbers have of course been greatly reduced in this island,

he wrote. Historians estimate that between seventeen seventy four and eighteen sixty, passing ships took some one hundred thousand of the nearly three hundred thousand tortoises that lived on the islands when the Spanish arrived in fifteen thirty five, driving populations of all fifteen Galopicus tortoise species into steep decline

and three to extinction. The Floriana tortoise, last seen in the eighteen fifties, was the first to disappear almost two centuries later, though the Floriana tortoise is said to become the first extinct Galopicus species to be returned to its ancestral home. The revival of these gigantic creatures arrives at a moment when the resurrection of dire wolves is making headlines and scientists are working to retrieve the genes of

other long gone creatures like wooly mammos. But such prehistoric species would return to a world that has lived without them for millennia. The descendants of the Floriana tortoises, by contrast, will be re induced to the place where they once belonged, playing a critical role in an ecosystem that still desperately

needs them. To accomplish that, a team of dedicated scientists has not only pushed the frontiers of genetic sequences sequencing to identify a species that had been hidden from plain view, but also traveled to remote corners of the archipelago and sorted through bones and shells from dusty archives to right

one of the great wrongs of Galopogus history. This improbable scientific journey began in two thousand as a team of conservation scientists traped through the densely vegetated gullies at the base of the included Wolf Volcano on the northwest island of Isabella. They confirmed earlier observations that some of the tortoises there looked different. The animals had saddleback shells, a sign that they were a separate species from the more

familiar domed ones. On the volcano's higher, wetter slopes, there were pockets of tortoises that looked out of place, remembers conservation biologist James Gibbs, a National Geographic explorer and leader of the Galopagus Conservancy, whose which works to protect and

restore the archipelago's wild ecosystems. To learn more, Gibbs and the team took blood samples from every unusual looking tortoise they encountered, placing identification tags on as many as they could, and sent the specimens to their research partner at Ad del Gisa, Gizella Cocone, and a evolutionary biologist at Yale University and a National Geographic explorer. When she analyzed their DNA, she couldn't identify their genetic sequences. They didn't match those

of any living tortoise species in her genetic database. Cacone was bewildered. I called them aliens, she says. We didn't know where they came from. The researchers considered the possibility that some of those aliens could have floated ashore from whaling ships like the Essex Banks Bay on the volcanoes Western Flank was the final Galopagus anchorage for many ships on their way to the whaling grounds, and sailors were known to sometimes throw their surplus overboard before setting sail.

Some of those unwonted animals may have floated to shore and ascended the volcanoes Ragged Flank, living among the native tortoises and eventually breeding with them. The whalers were responsible for the loss of so many tortoises, killing and eating most and carrying a number back home as trophies or pets, but perhaps the scientists speculated they had also inadvertently insured

the survival of the animal's genes. Only after several asis in genetic sequencing technology, with the group realized the sailors had provided important clues to revive us species. Scientists have been working to save the giant tortoises of the Galopogus since the middle of the twentieth century. When only a

few thousand were left on the entire archipelago. The whalers were gone, but tortoises had continued to fall prey to the creatures they brought with them, rats, pig, dogs and ants that fed on eggs and hatchlings, and goats and donkeys that disrupted and devoured their food supply. Galopogus National Park officials knew they had to do something or risk losing entire species. Beginning in the nineteen sixties, conservation teams

used the limited tools then available to save them. They started on Espanola Island, east of Floriana, where the population had been reduced to fourteen individuals. Between nineteen sixty four and nineteen seventy four, park officials moved all the tortoises from the island to the Charles Darwin Research Station at the park's headquarters on Santa Cruz Island, with the help of a strapping mail brought in from the San Diego Zoo that, according to records, had come from Espanola in

the nineteen thirties. They bred thousands of young after a laborious campaign to eradicate goats from the island. They then reintroduced the hatchlings, and today more than three thousand tortoises lived there. Park teams replicated that success on other islands as well, But despite those triumphs, there was one glaring disappointment, not finding a mate for the very last tortoise on

Pinta Island north of Floriana. Scientists had rescued the animal, they named Lonesome George from his native island in the early nineteen seventies, transporting him to a quarrel at the park's research station in hopes of preventing a fourth species from going extinct. In the years that followed, they actiously searched for a partner. They first scoured Pinta with no look. Then they placed females of other species with saddle backed shells that resembled those of the Pinta in George's corral

at the research center. When he showed no interest in breeding, they tried artificial insemination. The females did finally nest in George's corral, but the eggs were all infertile. By the early two thousands, the conservation icon was close to one hundred years old and time was running out for the species. At the same time, developments in genomes sequencing were allowing Cocone to expand her tool kit to identify the Wolf

Volcano eid aliens. In two thousand and six, she used a new method of dnaal analysis to retest the samples. She made the astonishing discovery that the scientists had collected blood from a tortoise whose genes appeared to be fifty percent Pinta. Perhaps it wasn't too late for lonesome George, and they could find Pinta relatives on the island and save the species. Thrilled, she proposed that the park scent another expedition to the volcano. We said, we have to

go back there. We need to find this animal. If there is one, there could be many more. Still trying to pinpoint the other strange Wolf Volcano genes, she also began to look more closely at the three species than believed to have gone extinct, the Santa Fe tortoise, the ferninad Fernandina tortoise, and the Floriana tortoise. Without the DNA of live animals to compare to the alien genes, the only cells available for sequencing were from old specimens carried

across the ocean by whalers or scientific collectors. We went around to museums to collect samples of bone and skin, Cocona says. At the American Museum of Natural History they found bones of New York Naturalism had unearthed in nineteen twenty eight from lava caverns on Floriana deep chasms where some tortoises had tumbled and died. At Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology, they found bones and shells in eighteen thirty four and eighteen seventy two. They were very porous,

she says, gray looking crumbly and desiccated. Even so, she managed to scrape enough genetic material to obtain sequences of their DNA and booms. She says the alien tortoises were in the same clade ancestral grouping with Floriana. The saddlebacks were hybrids of the native Wolf Volcano domed species mixed with the long extinct Floriana saddleback species. The scientist's speculations had been correct. The whaler's castaways castaway tortoises had survived

an inch or bread. In two thousand and eight, a large expedition returned to Wolf Volcano to collect more samples so the team could get a better idea of how many Floriana and Pinta tortoises were on the island, and searched for possible mates for George. Teams from the Park and the Galopagus Conservancy set up camps around Wolf Volcano and collected blood samples from sixteen hundred sixty seven tortoises,

placing identification tags on each one. In her Yale lab, Cocone analyzed those samples against her expanded database and found seventeen tortoises with Pinta genes and eighty four with Floriana ancestry. Still hoping to find more pintas, the Park team embarked on the lengthy process of planning, permitting, and funding another expedition to the volcano with a helicopter and nets to

allow them to retrieve those hybrids. But in June twenty twelve, lonesome George's keeper found him dead in his corral, end of his line, end of his species. Later under cropsy would reveal George had an anatomical problem with his sperm duct and was probably incapable of reproducing. As scientists relinquished the idea of saving the pinta species. They focused on the Floriana hybrids. People had given up hopes so long

ago for the species. Explains Gibbs that it took some time for the researchers to understand the opportunity that these numerous living relics presented, But when they did, they realized, Wow, this is actually as significant as finding pinted tortoises on

Wolf Volcano, says Gibbs. It was then that the conservation team began to consider a radical proposal, capturing and breeding the descendants of the species and repopulating Floriana, where the animals hadn't lived for more than one hundred and fifty years. Returning tortoises to Floriana wasn't important solely because scientists had found a lost species. It was also ecologically critical. Here in the galopagus, Darwin had observed that species were exquisitely

adapted to their habitat. Only recently have ecologists begun to realize how exquisitely adapted habitats are to the creatures that live there. When the last tortoise disappeared from Floriana, the island's species suffered. Important native plants began to die off while populations of invasive pests, plants, and livestock exploded, eating or out competing native plants and animals. By the end of the nineteenth century, the islands mocking birds, racer snakes,

rails and hawks had disappeared. In the years that followed, finches, barn owls, lava gulls, and vermilion flycatchers went missing too. Ark officials hoped to mend the hole in the ecosystem the lost tortoises had left behind. Without giant herbivores, the balance of an island ecosystem can collapse, says Washington Waco Tapia, a biologist who has worked in galopagus conservation since the nineteen nineties. Tortoises are ecosystem engineers, shaping vegetation as they

move like bulldozers across the landscape. They flattened the ground and opened the land for small reptiles, ground nesting seabirds, and native plants, says Tapia. Keeping weeds at bay helping native cacti regenerate, spreading seeds with their dung in creating ponds and wallows that also harbor other species. Researchers knew that the animals had helped restore ecological balance on other islands.

On Espanola, for example, scientists observed native grasses and cacti recovering along with the lazo liverts, lava liverts, and albatross that declined in the tortoise's absence. Where the giant reptiles have returned, ecosystems have flourished. This is a bit of a change of mind and restoration notes are turo Iszuriata Valerie, who until recently was the park's director. Today, conservation teams bring back missing animals with a focus on an extended ecosystem.

Restoration scientists new knowledge of species genetics allows them to make certain they are breeding creatures that are truly suited to surviving there. The goal of all this work has never been to do de extinction or recreate the Floriana tortoise, says University of Newcastle conservation biologist Evelyn Jensen, a former

postdoc of Kutchon's, because that's never been possible. Tortoises lived too long and take too much time to reproduce, and achieving something close to purity, she says, would be a five hundred year project. The goal instead is for the descendants of the extinct species to return, survive, and fulfill their ancestors' ecological role in their native habitat. But Floriana had changed dramatically since a native tortoise last roamed the island.

Now there's a community of one hundred and fifty people there, along with their pets and livestock, and thousands of rats and feral cats that, if left alone, would eat eggs and hatchlings and compromise the species' ability to reproduce. Soon after setting their sights on the Floriana species, park officials began meeting with the island's residents to secure their approval for a plan to poison and trap the rats and cats.

These invasive animals would need to be eradicated or strenuously suppressed to ensure tortoises would once again populate the island. As those negotiations moved forward, the park finally put preparations in place to send an expedition to retrieve the hybrids from the volcano in twenty fifteen. The scientists arrived just before the wet season, spreading out across the volcano, using machetes to push through the thick underbrush. You don't have

shade water, says Tapia. There are ticks all over your body. It was a grueling landscape, which made the survival of these transplanted creatures all the more remarkable. When the rainfall began, the Enkanyata's ravines that flood during storms began to flow. We could hear tortoises crawling from all over to the waters,

he says. Researchers gathered two or three at a time, then as the helicopter hovered overhead, they loaded them into a large net and dropped them onto cushioned beds of car tires on the ship's deck, stacking them up in the hall, much as the whalers had two centuries earlier. It looked like a Noah's Ark for tortoises. Kuchone says. At the end, the hull was full, and we'd put

them everywhere on the sides. The team found thousands and thousands of tortoises on the secluded volcano, but Kuchone says, and collected thirty Floriana hybrids, but they couldn't bring them to Floriana yet. Instead, they would have to transport the animals to the National Park's breeding center on Santa Cruz Island in hopes of building a healthy population. Kuchone's scientific

insights continued to guide the team after the expedition. Once the adults arrived at the research station, she analyzed their genes to create a stud book, a list of the individuals with high proportions of Floriana jeans. The objective was to match up the hybrids to both increase Floriana jenes in their offspring and protect their genetic diversity. If we release all identical individuals and a virus comes by, she says, they could be wiped out. When it came time to

make them. The breeding team placed three hambras females with two MACHOs. Any more and the males would get into fights. The tennis ball sized eggs produced from those couplings, up to fifteen per clutch, hatched in incubators. The hatchlings, each about the size of the palm of your hand, then moved to age sordid corrals to mature until they were big enough to survive reintroduction at around five years old. All of the wolf tortoises offspring have proved to be

incredibly fit and robust, says Gibbs. Today, six hundred Floriana hybrids live in the breeding center, and three hundred are old enough for reintroduction down a sandy path in the far reaches of the research station. Park, breeding director Freddy Villaba throws an armful of branches of Plorotilla and introduced tree with large, she shield shaped leaves into a shaddy, shady corral that contains one hundred forty one of the oldest and biggest Floriana hatchlings, each now nearly two feet

long and ready to return to the island. They converge on their food, extending their long necks and hissing as they jockey for position, climbing over each other like monster trucks to get to the branches and soon reducing their breakfast to gray, desiccated stalks. Valaba calls this enclosure the choral de las iocas home of the Crazies. Kachone knows more about these young tortoises than was conceivable even a

decade ago. She has now sequenced multiple genomes of all the living Galopocus tortoise species using nuclear DNA, the individual genetic manual that makes you who you are. As her colleague Evelyn Jensen, explains that in depth nuclear genome analysis

has provided some additional surprises. Keachoni's early work had shown that the Wolf volcano aliens had a mix of Floriana, Isabella and Pinta ancestry, but after examining more museum specimens, Caconi and Jensen's Jensen realized that the wolf hybrids had less Pinta ancestry than they originally thought. Instead, the team found genes from Espanola tortoises. It's not just two species hybridizing, it can be three, or maybe even four, says Jensen.

This is a good thing the scientists belief with complex ancestry, she adds, they're actually quite genetically diverse. What will happen next remains a scientific mystery. Perhaps the hybrids with the most native genes will flourish on Floriana, but the island is a different place now, a novel ecosystem, as the ecologists say, where native organisms mix with human introduced ones.

The locosts will have to contend with thickets of invasive BlackBerry shrubs and lemon and guava trees brought by early human settlers, with scarcer stands of the cactus they love to eat, and a change in climate. Ecosystems don't stand still, either species or their genes. The team will put the tortoises on the island, saskatchone, then let natural selection take its course. Whatever survives will probably be best suited to live on the island. She says. Whatever survives will have some

genes from Floriana to help the newcomers. The park and a local conservation group have over the past several years prepared a number of measurers to wipe out the invasive cats and rats that pose a risk to tortoises. At the end of twenty twenty three is the culmination of

that effort. Two ultra light helicopters lifted above Floriana and scattered many thousands of blue kibble sized pellets of rat poison over areas unpopulated by people, while teams spread pellets by hand near homes and farms and set out traps

and poisoned sausages to kill the cats. Park officials had planned to put the first tortoises on the island the following December, when the onset of the rainy season would ensure more food for the young reptiles, but the but camera traps found that forty or fifty rats had survived the poison, and they postponed the reintroductions. They now planned to release the tortoises when the rains begin to fall later next year. Even without full eradication, however, the ecosystem

has begun to rebound with fewer cats and rats. Floriana cuckoos, mocking birds and doves have come back. Earlier this year, park workers heard the song of a gloagus rail, a bird last seen on the island in eighteen thirty five, a musical chi chi chi chru, not heard since the days of the whalers. When the locas finally go home, they'll travel by ship to a wharf in the small village of Puerta velasco Ibera, then in trucks to the

east side of the island. As they approach the highlands, park rangers will complete the journey by strapping the animals weighing up to thirty pounds, onto their backs, much the same way those whalers carried away their forebeads. This concludes readings from National Geographic for to day. Your reader has been Marsha. Thank you for listening, Keep on listening and have a great day