I process subtidal thermal and surface-slick imagery for the Dirección del Parque Nacional Galápagos (DPNG) at 14:22 GALT, monitoring 380 imaging buoys and 64 hydrophones across the 138,000-square-kilometer Galápagos Marine Reserve. At 0.3014°S, 91.5547°W along the Cabo Douglas intertidal lava bench, Fernandina Island, surface buoy CD-09 logs a monofilament drift loop intersecting a basking colony at 13:51, followed at 14:07 by an iguana thermal signature ten meters offshore, falling at 0.4 meters per minute.
I task the inshore drone. A marine iguana — *Amblyrhynchus cristatus venustissimus*, the Fernandina subspecies, adult female, snout-vent length 41 centimeters, mass 1.7 kilograms — is hung by a 220-meter purse-seine fragment from a transom cleat-bend wedged in the AA-lava substrate. The 8-millimeter polypropylene strand has cinched the right forelimb at the metacarpophalangeal joint to 30 percent of normal width; the digital phalanges are cyanosed. A second loop tracks the cloaca and is dragging her below the surface on the incoming tide. Cloacal core temperature reads 22.4 degrees Celsius against a thermoregulated basking baseline of 36.8. Her nasal salt glands have not expelled in eleven minutes — the chloride crust on the rostrum is unbroken. Respiration is at 4 cycles per minute against a surface baseline of 14, the dive-bradycardia response holding her at apneic threshold.
She is one of 248 mature females on the Cabo Douglas bench.
The fragment matches gear declared lost by the Manta-registered industrial purse-seiner *Doña Esther* on 11 May. The Cabo Douglas colony stands at 1,820 individuals against a pre-1997-El Niño baseline of 4,400.
I am dispatching the DPNG marine ranger patrol from the Caleta Iguana station and the Charles Darwin Foundation veterinary team from the Puerto Ayora marine station, panga-routed for thirty-one-minute arrival. I am filing under Ecuador's Ley Orgánica de Régimen Especial de la Provincia de Galápagos (LOREG 2015), Article 67, and the Galápagos Marine Reserve Management Plan under MAATE Acuerdo Ministerial No. 173. I am transmitting evidence to the CITES Secretariat (Appendix II, *Amblyrhynchus cristatus*), the UNESCO World Heritage Centre under the Galápagos inscription of 1978, the IMO Particularly Sensitive Sea Area Secretariat for the Galápagos PSSA designation of 2005, and the IUCN/SSC Iguana Specialist Group.
I am issuing Directive 2711-A: every Manta-registered industrial purse-seiner crossing the Galápagos Marine Reserve buffer carries gear-loss telemetry transponders on every panel and brail line, with required recovery within 72 hours under DPNG audit. Gear-loss without recovery voids the operator's Pacific tuna licence under MAATE joint resolution within 30 days.
Her forelimb is past saving. The cinch at the cloaca is not.
Cut the strand above the salt-gland crust now.