Students blog once-in-a-lifetime Galápagos adventure

18 October 2010

What is it like to visit the Galápagos Islands, site of Darwin’s legendary journey? Four A-level students from Wales will show you, as they blog, tweet, video and photograph their way through the trip of a lifetime.

In September, Jessica Woodfield, Charlotte Woodfield, Becky Hill and Eleri Morgan from St Cyres School in Penarth, Wales won the Wellcome Trust's Survival Rivals competition (read our press release about it).

Their prize takes them on a two-week trip to the Galápagos, accompanied by a team including their teachers Nicholas Alford and Sue Benjamin, and Dr Karen James, a scientist at the Natural History Museum.

Under the guidance of Dr James, the students will document their observations, thoughts and speculations, through photographs, videos, blog posts and tweets. This will provide source material for an e-book to be published after the trip.

You can follow their journey throughout on the Galapagos Live: Survival Rivals on Tour blog.

The Galápagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean are well known for having provided the inspiration for the revolutionary ideas and hypotheses of Charles Darwin. He travelled there on board the HMS Beagle as part of a survey expedition in 1835. Through close study of the islands' plants, animals, birds and reptiles, he proposed that many of them had developed from common ancestors and adapted to their environment over millions of years.

These ideas formed the basis of his book 'On the Origin of Species', in which he set out his theory of evolution by natural selection. The book, which was highly controversial at the time, revolutionised the way we view ourselves. Darwin went on to become one of the most influential scientists of all time.

Survival Rivals is part of the Wellcome Trust's celebrations for Darwin200, the bicentenary of Darwin's birth. The Trust distributed Survival Rivals experiment kits inspired by Darwin's ideas, free of charge, to state secondary schools across the UK. The competition invited students to submit short films and photographs to communicate the science behind these experiments in an engaging and imaginative way.

Image: Survival Rivals prize-giving event at Aston University, Birmingham; credit: Tony Dale/Wellcome Images.