Vampire Finches and the Power of Adapting to a Harsher World

In the Galapagos Islands, about 600 miles from the South American country of Ecuador, there are Finches that drink blood. Yes, those Finches, the cute little ones that flutter around in your yard. Let’s back up. The Galapagos islands have been studied for centuries (Charles Darwin is one of the most well-known explorers) because of the extreme biodiversity of the island’s creatures and plants, on isolated islands that don’t have many resources available.

 One of the resources is freshwater, which is almost non-existent on the islands. However, most birds and mammals, Finches (who, in a sense, wound up there by accident about 500,000 years ago) need freshwater to survive. However, given the choice of simply dying off or evolving to need less freshwater, the Finches chose another, more sustainable option—and this is what Darwin meant by Survival of the Fittest. Their name (not surprisingly) is Darwin’s Finches.

 These Finches developed a symbiotic (give and take) relationship with the seabirds on the island, and would eat the parasites off of the skin and feathers of the Nazca Boobies (yes, that is the real name). The Boobies (as I will refer to them, because, why not) got to get parasites removed and the Finches had extra food. Over time, though, as food became more scarce, the Finches discovered that after eating the parasites, they could use their sharp pointed beaks(a beak shape that came about as they evolved and adapted) to drink the blood of the Boobies, a much richer source of nutrition and water. Now, they live forever. No, just kiddin’. But the rest is absolutely true and proves the true power of adaptation in times of deep change and scarce resources.

As humans living in modern civilizations, we have become used to certain resources and necessities being available to us (those resources are different depending on what part of the world we live in). Adapting and allowing our ongoing evolution to occur makes it much more likely that we could survive climate disaster, and even learn how to thrive in a world that hasn’t been experienced for millions of years.

Being aware of this and preparing for that likelihood is often called “prepping”, but old-school prepping is often associated with hoarding tons of canned and prepackaged food and guns. But if Finch bird food was just dropped off at the island in bulk, once it ran out, the Finches would be right back where they started. To adapt to the new reality, we must be ready to leave the old ways behind us, and to move into the future with fresh eyes, perhaps having learned to bow and spear hunt and clean our own food, how to grow fruits and vegetables in a garden, how to identify plants, and how to defend ourselves from attackers without the use of guns (that have limited ammo). This means changing how we protect ourselves from infectious disease as the antibiotics and antivirals stop working (this process has already started).

Adopting the hunter-gatherer way of living (and picking up some new ways of living that we never considered) will help us to survive what many others will not. Anything that requires the machinery of civilization to be running will fall away eventually, so that needs to be considered. Evolution is the key to avoiding extinction; adaptation is the way. 

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

—Charles Darwin