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The Times of India

World

TOI World Desk

Rabbit Release Reshapes Island: One doe transforms Porto Santo ecology; Darwin reading upended

A storm carried a Portuguese fleet off course in 1418 to an uninhabited island in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. The commanders of this expedition, João Gonçalves Zarco, Tristão Vaz Teixeira and Bartolomeu Perestrelo, named this island Porto Santo because they appreciated the safe landing on the island, according to the Portuguese National Archive’s virtual exhibit of Discovering Madeira and Porto Santo Islands. According to tradition, when Bartolomeu Perestrelo returned in 1419 to lead the settlement of the island, he released a doe rabbit and her newborns upon landing. The act is said to have seemed harmless at the time, but within decades it transformed the island's ecology, and the rabbits it produced were later cited by Darwin as one of his best-known examples of evolutionary change.

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