Free Republic

The top of Darwin's Arch, the famous natural stone archway in the northern Galapagos Islands, has crashed into the waves, according to news reports. The arch, located less than 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) off the steep and rocky coast of Darwin Island, collapsed as "a consequence of natural erosion," on May 17, the Ecuador Ministry of Environment and Water wrote in Spanish on Twitter. The natural arch was named for the English biologist Charles Darwin, who studied evolution in the Galapagos during his voyage aboard the HMS Beagle in the early 1830s. Now that the arch's top is gone, one...

Ecuador has sounded the alarm after its navy discovered a huge fishing fleet of mostly Chinese-flagged vessels some 200 miles from the Galápagos Islands, the archipelago which inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. About 260 ships are currently in international waters just outside a 188-mile wide exclusive economic zone around the island, but their presence has already raised the prospect of serious damage to the delicate marine ecosystem, said a former environment minister, Yolanda Kakabadse. “This fleet’s size and aggressiveness against marine species is a big threat to the balance of species in the Galápagos,” she told the Guardian. He...