Tristan da Cunha

South America, the Falkland Islands and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands.

Africa, St. Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, which are all sort of somewhere between Africa and South America.

Asia, we have the British Indian Ocean Territory.

Oceania has the Pitcairn Islands and Antarctica has British Antarctic Territory.

You have to fly to French Polynesia and make a 32 hour boat trip.

I would love to see it, but I don't think it's going to happen.

32 hours, is that all? Also, Tristan da Cunha, that is the world's most remote inhabited archipelago.

So remote, in fact, that when the International Space Station passes directly overhead, its crew are six times closer to the island than anyone else on Earth.

Then you head south, you spot Trinidad, that's three.

All the way down to Tristan da Cunha, that's four.

Then you got Saint Helena, Ascension Island, that's six.

And then essentially a flyby of, you know, one of the Caribbean islands, and then Bermuda, and that's eight.

They can break down and basically you can pack up everything you'd possibly need, a turnkey solution, in a meter-by-meter box and send it around the world at very low cost.

And that shift to carbon fiber and modular systems is why we can count fish in places like Pitcairn, Tristan da Cunha, uh antarctica and all these places where previously it was very difficult to get equipment out to

which is yeah going on to one of my questions later was talking about some of the most remote no no that's that's great like i i'm going to get to that question a bit later but how you've integrated it um one into really remote places of the world but integrated with the traditional owners there and as you said you've you don't need a whole lot of money to be able to do that.

And one of the short films that we're actually creating together, I guess, is exactly that and how you've got the locals to use the equipment and then be able to monitor their fish communities through this technology.

Now, in my field, working on open ocean fish, it's not like I'm just going to jump in and go for a snorkel in 3,000 meters of water.

And the videos give us that capacity to see what's going on.

And one of my postdocs in my lab, Chris Thompson, he was working on all these amazing places like Tristan da Cunha and so on.

And he was staring at endless amounts of video.

The April trips in South Georgia are not common.

It's because you did that Tristan Acuna trip.

I don't know if you know this, Charisse, but Nikki was on the Hantavirus cruise.

I was.

But medical surveys revealed elevated rates of certain genetic conditions, consistent with inbreeding in a small founder population.

The inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha, the most remote inhabited island on earth, descended from 15 original settlers and after two centuries showed elevated rates of asthma, traceable to three founders who carried the predisposition.

Both cases involved populations that were small but not sealed.

occasional immigration introduced fresh genetic material that partially offset inbreeding effects.

The passages between the various islands communicating with the North Atlantic are all less than one thousand fathoms in depth.

The South Atlantic differs from the North Atlantic in having no seas penetrating into the continents and remarkably few and small islands like Ascension, Tristan da Cunha, St. Helena, and Trinidad.

The dominant feature is the central ridge with deep water on either side, which appears to be connected by a low ridge with the west coast of Africa.

The superficial area of the entire Atlantic Ocean, including the Arctic, Norwegian, Mediterranean, Caribbean Seas, etc., and extending southward to the Antarctic continent, is estimated at about forty-two millions of square miles, divided according to depth as follows.

Charles Darwin, in his Origin of Species, mentions J.D. Dana, J. Richardson, and Joseph Hooker as having observed resemblances between the genera of the two polar regions, and Edward Forbes gives some examples of generic forms within two centres of dispersion, one in each hemisphere, separated by a tropical discontinuity.

In the first shallow-water dredgings in the southern temperate regions, the Challenger naturalists were struck with the resemblance of the fauna to what they were accustomed to dredge off the coasts of Europe in similar depths.

C. Wyvill Thompson writes, quote, These shallow-water dredgings around Tristan da Cunha gave a great amount of material, the fauna being very much of the same character as that of somewhat shallower water in the north.

This is Ashley Iaconetti from the Almost Famous podcast.

the only show of resistance it made to being drawn on board was to extend its wings and utter loud discordant cries once on deck its grace and majesty vanished it showed no fear and the hook still fastened in its beak did not seem to annoy it but no landsman could have been more awkward than was the albatross on the smooth rocking-deck it staggered and waddled clumsily and tried in vain to lift itself with its wings it showed considerable temper and snapped furiously at all who approached and the captain's dog which came trotting up full of curiosity over the strange visitor received a terrible blow from the hooked beak which sent him howling with pain to the most distant corner of the deck as the officer was desirous to preserve the beak breast wings and feet of this magnificent creature as souvenirs he ordered the sailors to kill it although he states that it impressed him as though he were commanding the execution of some royal personage the albatross is an expert swimmer and floats on the waves like a piece of cork riding in undisturbed serenity over the lofty foaming crests of stormy billows it is not however a good diver and is obliged to subsist on whatever food comes to the surface It might be called the vulture of the seas, for dead fish, floating carcasses of whales, and other sea refuge form its main diet.

the habits of the albatross during the breeding season are still partially veiled in mystery as the desolate mossy headlands of tristan da cunha inaccessible island and other lands lying far to the southward where the albatross makes its nest are visited only at rare intervals the island of tristan is circular and almost entirely volcanic and on the summit of its cliffs which rise a thousand feet above the sea on broad dreary plains of dark gray lava the albatrosses gather some time during november and prepare themselves nests selecting some space free from the tussock grass the bird scrapes together a circle of dried grass and clay in which it lays one egg about the size of a swan's white with a band of small brick-red spots round one end but few naturalists have been able to visit these great breeding warrens and none have determined how the albatross lives and feeds its young during its absence from the ocean it is certain that the great bird rarely leaves its nest for there is a wicked little robber gull ever on the watch to break and eat the egg should the mother bird desert it for a moment the young when hatched are snow-white and covered with a soft woolly down a traveller once climbed up the dangerous precipice of tristan da cunha and saw these young helpless things lying in the nests while several hundred pair of parent birds were stalking awkwardly about they all snapped their beaks with a great noise and ejected from them an offensive oil their only means of defence the same traveller visited the place five months later when he found all the young albatrosses sitting in their nests as before but the old birds had all disappeared it is supposed that an albatross may be a year old before it can fly and as the parents depart some time in april for their ocean hunting grounds and are never seen to return until the breeding season again comes round it is astonishing what feeds and supports the young until they are able to hunt for themselves naturalists wonder over this point and advance many different theories but as yet no facts have been discovered in regard to the diet of the young and helpless bird the albatross was formerly regarded with superstitious reverence by sailors who considered this majestic companion which came around the ship in desolate icy seas as a bird of good omen and to kill one was considered a crime that would surely be punished by disaster and shipwreck Coleridge, the English poet, has written a wonderful poem on this superstition called The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, to which Gustave Doré, a French artist, has drawn a series of illustrations picturing the lonely frozen ocean and the majestic lordly albatross which the unhappy sailor shot with his crossbow, thereby bringing misfortune and death on the goodly ship and his crew.

Section 7 of Harper's Young People, Volume 1, Issue 25, April 20, 1880.

This is a LibriVox recording.