Blackberry eradication

For my native & invasive plants class, I'm working with a classmate on a class project to make a brief documentary on invasive plants of the island.  Ethan and I have decided to focus on mora, blackberries, which are invasive on the island and causing a lot of ecological damage.  Fast growing, they are easily spread by the Darwin's finches, one of the most iconic Galapagos animals.   Mora grows quickly so that it can overshadow native plants, blocking their access to sunlight and eventually smothering them.  On friday for class we took a trip to the highlands of the island, first stopping at the Cafetal, the largest coffee plantation on the island.  Almost everything on the plantation is introduced, from the overshadowing Spanish Cedar, guava, gauyava, and the coffee itself.  Thankfully, coffee is a labor intensive plant, and can't survive in the wild well enough to take over the island.   Since the coffee season isn't til August, there was only a skeleton crew running the plantation, be it was really neat to see all of the machinery used to separate the bean from the flesh of the fruit.

Afterwards, we took the taxis further up the highlands, to el Junco, a pond in an old caldera- the only source of freshwater on the island.  From there, we unloaded bikes and road down the mountains back to Puerto Baqurezo, making stops along the way to check different plants, especially invasive one, on the way down.  Along the road, the 3 main invasive plants were moras (blackberries), rose apple, and guava.  All three are good dispersers because of their ability to spread easily with small seeds, and all three are popular with local birds and animals.  The ride down was fun, though a little treacherous for all the gravel on the road, something Patrick learned about the hard way, whipping out, and have to get driven to the hospital to be bandaged up.

This afternoon, Ethan and I travelled to the highlands again, this time with a trio of rangers from the Parque Nacional, who were going up to do some mora eradication. We drove back to el Junco, then filmed the rangers as they used machetes to hack down the thick forest of mora growing beside the road.  A small group of foreign volunteers was helping them in their task.  Alas, for lack of long sleeves and machetes (shouldn't have left mine at home!), we couldn't join in the carnage, so we filmed and interviewed on of the rangers before planning our documentary.