(Editor’s note: Sanjayan, The Nature Conservancy’s lead scientist, is traveling in the Solomon Islands to explore the amazing diversity of life and the fast vanishing marine and terrestrial habitats on these islands. As part of this expedition, Sanjayan’s experiences will be made available to students across the United States by the interactive curricula company Promethean Planet. Sanjayan’s stories from the field, photography, video and more will be developed into innovative lesson ideas to be used in classrooms equipped with interactive whiteboards. To learn more, visit Promethean Planet.)

If you want to study evolution (how things change over time through the process of natural selection) or study speciation (where and how species arise and diverge) you go to islands.

It’s not an accident that Darwin visited more islands on his famous voyage around the world than he did countries. Also, Ernst Mayr — the world’s preeminent evolutionary biologist in modern times — developed his concept of what a species is and his take on evolution and speciation after his visit to the Solomon Islands.

Decades later, Jared Diamond — a Pulitzer Prize winning author about the collapse of civilizations, and a major modern contributor to our understanding of evolution — also drew inspiration from the Solomon Islands.

Today, Dr. Chris Filardi (who is on our expedition) and others are adding to this long lineage of scientific discovery, continuing to refine the answer to the question that Darwin posed but never himself answered — where do all these species come from? Indeed, Darwin’s classic (On the Origin of Species) should have been posed as a question. Despite the title, he did not solve the problem of speciation — namely, how multiple related species originate from a single ancestral species. Darwin’s contributions instead have to do with the fact and mechanism of evolutionary change over time.

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(Editor’s note: Sanjayan, The Nature Conservancy’s lead scientist, is traveling in the Solomon Islands to explore the amazing diversity of life and the fast vanishing marine and terrestrial habitats on these islands. As part of this expedition, Sanjayan’s experiences will be made available to students across the United States by the interactive curricula company Promethean Planet. Sanjayan’s stories from the field, photography, video and more will be developed into innovative lesson ideas to be used in classrooms equipped with interactive whiteboards. To learn more, visit Promethean Planet.)

I wanted to mention that back on Gatoke, giant eels live in river pools (see video). The people don’t harm the eels — in fact, they believe that the eels help make the water “strong” (i.e., clean and healthy). Many of the people here are also Seventh Day Adventists and believe they should not eat fish without scales. So eels are off the menu.

They are a bit scary to touch. Like jelly. And they do nip and make you jump when your feet bump into one in the dark water. Also, they’re each four feet long — and about as thick as my forearm.

Kolombangra (above) is not far from Tetepare — about 3 hours by fast boat, maybe 50 kilometers away. It is a huge strato volcano. It goes up to about 6,000 feet, and is covered in lush tropical forest. It is also the site of a major conservation effort in the Solomon Islands — an effort to protect the forests and work with a timber company that is certified as a sustainable harvester through a process called FSC (Forest Stewardship Council).

Kolomombangra is now the largest terrestrial protected area in the Solomon Islands.  The forest is thick and fantastic. Its steep slopes were probably at one time inhabited by people, maybe hiding out from headhunters who roamed the coasts. Now, it’s basically unpopulated except for the coastline, where there are small fishing villages and small logging communities. There are also crocodiles here, and we are very careful getting in and out of the boats approaching Kolombangra.

Strangler figs are common  in the tropics — these ones on Tetepare are enormous.  They are parasitic. They grow around a live tree stealing sap from the tree using it as a ladder to climb up to the sunlight (a great commodity for tropical forest plants) and then they drop runners down to the ground. Eventually the tree is completely covered in a lattice or scaffold of the strangler fig, and the tree eventually dies — leaving just the lattice of the parasitic strangler fig.

Hot stone cooking is done in many island nations in the Pacific. Stones are heated in a fire until they are super hot. Then they are placed in a deep pit about two feet deep, and layered with banana leaves — upon which packets of food wrapped in banana leaves are placed.

The packets contain yams, sweet potatoes, cassava, bread fruit, pork, fish, etc.  More hot stones are piled on top.  The whole thing is covered with earth (sand) and slow cooked underground for say 5 hours. The result is delicious and tender.

(Image 1: Kolombangra. Credit: Sanjayan/TNC. Image 2: Feast of hot-stone cooked food. Credit: Sanjayan/TNC. )

(Editor’s note: Sanjayan, The Nature Conservancy’s lead scientist, is traveling in the Solomon Islands to explore the amazing diversity of life and the fast vanishing marine and terrestrial habitats on these islands. As part of this expedition, Sanjayan’s experiences will be made available to students across the United States by the interactive curricula company Promethean Planet. Sanjayan’s stories from the field, photography, video and more will be developed into innovative lesson ideas to be used in classrooms equipped with interactive whiteboards. To learn more, visit Promethean Planet.)

On the way to Tetapare we see spinner dolphins — lots of them. Near the end of the video above, you can see a dolphin mom and her little baby sticking close and then they both leap out of the water. Note how the baby rides the mother’s bow wave — almost drafting off the mother like a cyclist would. The dolphins were great and spent about 20 minutes with us, riding the waves in front of the boat — about 50 dolphins.

Tetepare is the largest uninhabited island in the tropical South Pacific. Big, raw and green — a thick carpet of jungle, impenetrable to us. The island is about 120 sq kilometers — and it’s completely uninhabited except for a very small research camp. It’s an amazing opportunity for conservation.

One of the things they do here is tag turtles — hawksbill, green and even leatherbacks. One leatherback turtle tagged here swam all the way out to California.

It’s incredible to see how they do it here. The guys stand on the bow of the boat going at speed in shallow coral waters — peering into the water until they see a shadow. I can barely see underwater, but they can spot the shadow of a turtle gliding in the deep. When they see it, they are like bloodhounds, tracking it back and forth across the reef, back and forth, the guy in the bow using hand signals to guide the guy piloting the boat. It’s an amazing ballet.

Then when the turtle is near the surface, the guy on the bow dives in (no fins, no mask) and grabs the turtle by the shell and swims it to the surface. Turtle Rodeo is what they call it, and that’s exactly what it is. The turtles can be over 100 pounds and are very very strong swimmers. I am pretty sure I could not do it.

Once on the boat, we take it to shore, tag it with two metal tags on each flipper — like earrings. Then they measure the turtle, mark any injuries etc., and it’s released. The whole operation takes just an hour per turtle, and the professionalism of the guys here is incredible.

(Videos shot by Sanjayan/TNC.)

(Editor’s note: Sanjayan, The Nature Conservancy’s lead scientist, is traveling in the Solomon Islands to explore the amazing diversity of life and the fast vanishing marine and terrestrial habitats on these islands. As part of this expedition, Sanjayan’s experiences will be made available to students across the United States by the interactive curricula company Promethean Planet. Sanjayan’s stories from the field, photography, video and more will be developed into innovative lesson ideas to be used in classrooms equipped with interactive whiteboards. To learn more, visit Promethean Planet.

We are in the Solomon Islands. And it was an amazing experience just to get here.

First, the flight over the long long empty Pacific was devoid of any islands or atolls — 3,000 miles of emptiness. You realize just how big the Pacific is. Then, a small speck, clouds, forming over mountains. The Solomon Islands!

Next, our arrival is an event. Men in traditional costume great us at the airport — playing giant wooden pan pipes.

Honiara, the capital city on the island of Guadalcanal, is a sleepy town of about 70,000 people. But many people come and go on the giant ships in the harbor. The Solomons form one giant ocean nation, speckled with islands. Outside Honiara, in the harbor, are the remains of dozens of ships sunk during WWII. It’s called Iron Bottom Sound because so many ships (and their iron) litter the bottom of the ocean here — some 50 or so Japanese warships, troop carriers, cargo ships etc. The whole island of Guadalcanal was a big war zone, the location of the first ground forces engagement between U.S. and Japanese troops — made famous in the book Guadalcanal Diary.

We are only here for a day — then we’re off again to Gatoke in the New Georgia Group, an archipelago in the western Solomon Islands, to meet with communities deep in the jungle. We cross wooden bamboo bridges to get across the rivers — and there might be crocodiles lurking in some. And many have giant eels — 3 or 4 feet long, as thick as my forearm.

I made friends with a hornbill — Blythe’s Hornbill — a young male, who fell from a tree being logged in the forest. Destructive logging is a big problem here, and it is having a big impact on the forests.

Next to Tetepare – often called the last uninhabited island in the South Pacific.

(Image: Blythe’s hornbill and Sanjayan. Credit: TNC.)