Evolution Earth | Islands | Episode 2 – PBS

[Animals chattering] [Campbell-Staton] Islands are laboratories of life... places to see evolution in action.

[Rustling] On the most famous island laboratory of them all, Charles Darwin, or Chuck D, as I like to call him, got his first glimpses of how changes in the environment shape life.

And those animals are continuing to change... updating our understanding of what evolution means in the 21st century.

[Water bubbling] [Upbeat theme music playing] My name's Shane Campbell-Staton.

I'm an evolutionary biologist.

I'm here to tell you stories from filmmakers, scientists, and local experts across the globe about a pulse of change.

The entire planet is shifting.

The climate is changing at an incredible 170 times faster than it should be.

We can't always see it.

We're so caught up in our own thing.

You know?

But the signs are everywhere.

The entire tree of life is whispering to us.

[Water splashing] We just have to pay attention.

[Snorting] Out there, things aren't what you expect.

You'll see.

For an evolutionary biologist like me, nowhere on the planet can be more special than the Galapagos.

This is Nirvana.

Recently, we'd heard of signs of change etched in the ocean... reports of crazy activity in remote coves... predators behaving in unexpected ways.

El 06:00 nos levantamos... y los lobos "Auu auu auu" gritaban "Kshh kshh kshh."

[Splashing] [Man] Oh, qu pasa?

Qu pasa?

[Splashing] [Campbell-Staton] Sea lions are hunting in a way seen nowhere else in the world.

[Man] Una locura.

[Campbell-Staton] On the trail of this mysterious behavior, we caught up with local fisherman Franklin Arreaga who thinks he knows what's going on.

Ah ha.

Estoy pensando...ha ha ha!

Atacaban los lobos, los lobos cogan, seguian, seguian las albacoras.

[Campbell-Staton] Sea lions hunting tuna.

Now, that's not normal.

Franklin should know.

He spends his whole life fishing these waters.

[Franklin] La pesquera ha estado dentro de mi familia hace 50 aos.

Yo pesco de los 14, 15 aos.

[Campbell-Staton] Oh, wow!

Yeah.

That is definitely a big tuna.

[Franklin] Es mi vida, mi pasin, mi todo.

[Campbell-Staton] Franklin says he can take us to a secret cove to try and see the sea lion hunting in action.

But there are no guarantees.

[Chain rattling] You just have to wait.

[Rattling] Time for a one-on-one chat on the state of our changing planet.

[Franklin] Antes haba bastante abundancia.

Eh, hace unos 15 o 20 aos se pescaban, se pescaba cerca de puerto.

[Line unraveling, splashing] Ahora tenemos que correr ms lejos.

[Campbell-Staton] Up to 8 hours further... [Birds calling] something Franklin puts squarely at the feet of the industrial fishing fleets just outside Galapagos' waters.

He may be right.

90% of all global fish stocks are over-fished or completely depleted.

Don't just take Franklin's word for it.

The sea lions are also having a harder time finding fish... so much so, they are changing.

Normally, sea lions hunt sardines... but with fish stocks crashing, some are switching to a new prey... something 300 times bigger-- Franklin's tuna.

And he told us they aren't just hunting a new fish.

They're taking them down in a whole new way.

But, the wait was so long, we were beginning to wonder if this was just a fisherman's tale.

Then, finally... the sea lions arrive... on the hunt.

[Splashing] And, instead of chasing the tuna out in the open water... they corral them towards the shallows.

[Franklin] Ahora vienen todos lobos saltando como delfines a traer el atn... y tratar de encaminarlas a la poza.

[Campbell-Staton] Tuna are some of the fastest fish on the planet, 4 times faster than the sea lions.

[Franklin] Son como un misil en el agua.

[Campbell-Staton] So, the sea lions start to do something else new.

[Water bubbling] Normally, they hunt on their own, but now they play as a team.

It's like they're saying, "You go on the attack, and I'll hold down the defense."

A chaser drives the fish towards a dead end, but the fish turns to open ocean.

Blockers move in and cut off the escape.

[Sea gulls crying] Now the sea lions close the trap.

The water is getting shallower and shallower.

[Sea lion grunting] The tuna are out of their depth.

As the fish tire, the sea lions move in for the kill.

[Sea lion grunting] [Sea lion grunting] If you want to get all evolutionary about it, well, hunting as a team is socialization.

[Sea lion grunting] It shows the emergence of a new culture, underwater, in real time.

[Splashing] Any way you cut it, that's something very special.

It's a behavior new to science: animals changing in response to a new world order.

As the environment shifts 10 times faster than in the last 65 million years, the question is: Can life keep up with the pace of change?

[Bird calling] [Splashing] Well, there are new discoveries about that, too... [Splashing] with a much more famous Galapagos resident.

[Splashing] It's a giant in my world... [Chirping] the finch.

[Campbell-Staton] It was finches like this that cemented my man Chuck D's revolutionary theory of how animals change over time, how we all got to be who we are.

The incredible thing is, now they're doing it all over again.

Darwin showed that one kind of finch, isolated on different islands, can change into different kinds of finch with different kinds of beak... You have a beak for seeds... [Chirping] a beak for flowers... a beak for bugs... Aw, yeah!

[Chuckling] even a beak for blood.

Each beak adapted to the conditions of each island over millions of years.

"Survival of the fittest," as they say.

[Wings flapping] This isn't just a change in behavior.

It's an evolution of their physical form.

So far so good, but research is now showing that Darwin had one aspect of this story all wrong.

For 50 years, biologists have been capturing and recording Darwin's finches in every minute detail, and they've revealed something that would amaze Darwin-- the speed of change.

[Birds chirping] This is the guy to tell us all about it, one of the latest to dedicate their life to the birds-- local scientist Jaime Chaves.

[Jaime] For any evolutionary biologist to have even the chance to be on the Galapagos to study finches is kind of a gift.

[Campbell-Staton] Speaking to him, it's hard not feel a little jealous.

[Jaime] I'm just amazed by the amount of data that these little birds have been producing.

[Campbell-Staton] Nothing like a bit of data.

[Jaime] The difference between these two birds is the beak sizes.

So, this bird on the right-hand side has a smaller beak compared to this one on my left, although being both from the same species.

[Campbell-Staton] These tiny variations can mean the difference between life and death.

[Jaime] Almost 1 millimeter in beak length.

That maybe doesn't sound too big, but a dramatic environmental event can wipe out half of the population, because those birds didn't have the beak shape to respond to that dramatic change.

[Campbell-Staton] You don't need a whole different island for evolution to take place.

The data now show that all it takes is a big enough driving force, like a severe drought, and beak shapes can change almost overnight.

[Jaime] Evolution on the Galapagos is actually very fast.

We can actually measure how much evolution can happen between year 1 and year 2.

[Campbell-Staton] So, there you have it.

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Evolution Earth | Islands | Episode 2 - PBS