A rat, insects and litter: delights of mass tourism reach Galápagos

“Not since Hamelin has the discovery of a rat provoked so much alarm. It was only a single creature, but it had no business being on the island of Santa Fe in the isolated Galápagos archipelago, where conservationists now strive to keep foreign wildlife at bay as effectively as hundreds of miles of open ocean did for millions of years.

The rat is alleged to have arrived on the MV Discovery, a giant British cruise liner that visited the islands in April. Today, the ship is due to return to the Galápagos, and arriving with it are 460 paying passengers, protests and a campaign to protect the islands from such mass tourism.”

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