Of lizards, hedgehogs, Darwin and mass tourism...
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Of lizards, hedgehogs, Darwin and mass tourism...
Formentera is one of the smallest islands of the Baleares. Reachable by ferry boat from Ibiza. Thankfully, even that small distance, the absence of huge rave parties and of the world's most famous DJ's mean it is quite well protected and insulated. No traffic lights, yet ! The island's authorities have been quite keen to nurture what they have, protecting beaches, sealing off some areas to prevent wild parking , building wooden plank's paths to safeguard dunes and vegetations. Spear fishing is banned all around the island and strict limits are imposed to visiting yachts to anchor.
Still , we have seen the appearance of a few luxury SUV's , which makes sense as many roads are just mere paths of hard sand and rocks and quite steep at time but thick bushes with sharp thorns are delighted with those nice bright shiny paints.
Formentera as Ibiza are also called locally " Islas Pitiusas " : the term comes from the Greeks 2500 years ago discovering the islands were covered with pine trees.
Also local species but with different fate, lizards and hedgehogs. The "wall" lizard, I will pass on the latin name, is endemic to the two islands even though it is apparently under threat in Ibiza due to invasive snakes coming from the continent in tree trunks.
No such thing in Formentera where they are everywhere. Drop a bit of food on the terrace and they will come running and fighting for it. You cannot really domesticate them even though years ago , out of post lunch contemplation , we realized one had squeezed itself inside a wine bottle and looked completely out of its brain. So we tried to organize a race by capturing a few, showing them before hand a plate with a bit of rose wine and then tried to make them race in a rudimentary track made of wooden planks. No success, they all escaped !
They just have two natural predators : cats when they are bored or not enough tourists to feed them leftovers and humans. As wall lizards, they made a home of all those old stone walls that cover the island and encircle every house and field. And they are busy running all over : even though they are super fast and agile, their frenetic pace of running means that some times, they cannot avoid the wheels of a bicycle, scooter or car ! A lizard running is barely two centimeters above ground, a cyclist passing would be 80 times taller or more. Imagine the frenesy and panic to escape ! They are so unpredictable that even if you think you just avoided one, it can make a fast U-turn and come back under your wheels !
40 years ago, when I had the luck to discover this island, there were bikes, scooters , cars, not as many as today though. Car ferries were just running once a day, now it is every two hours . So the probability for a lizard to get run over has seriously increased but still managed to survive.
Just like the hedgehog ! This one has only one predator ! Human beings ! Not that there is a particular rage from humans to destroy those lovely little animals. But hedgehogs, believing that their spiky armour is their " bullet proof jacket" , still move at a desperately slow pace, unlike lizards who are space rockets in comparison. And those hedgehogs love to cross the road at night or very early morning. I can understand that 40 years ago or more with few cars, crossing the road was not that risky. But now, not only there are more cars and heavier ! Add the water delivery trucks which were virtually unknown two decades ago when you had to survive on the rainy season water for the summer . Darwin and his theories on evolution haven't found a friendly ear yet with hedgehogs and early morning cycling shows the victims of the night ! But that said, you still find them ! Meaning that despite being slaughtered on the road, they still reproduce fast enough to compensate .. until they can't !
So to survive, they will have to adapt ! Little chance that tourism will drop ! So they either have to get bigger but that will be tough due to challenging food supply . Get faster for hedgehogs or develop tyre piercing spikes. For the lizard, stop drinking rose so they will run in a straight line .
There is still a chance but as the famous historian Israeli writer Yuval Noah Harari was writing in his book " Homo Sapiens ", wherever they went , humans managed to get rid of 90 % of other living creatures..
Until then, we will keep feeding lizards and as most of the time we are chilled on our bikes so plenty of time to spot those hedgehogs !