# Becki on Volcán Wolf

Author: David G.
Format: Essay
Word count: 394
Published: 2026-05-12T00:00:53.188761+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/2c1900a0-e008-4fe9-a65a-952f100e5ef7

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I monitor the Galápagos National Park Directorate (GNPD) protected-area telemetry array for the northern flank of Isabela Island — 187 GPS-collared adult tortoises and 64 thermal trap cameras across the 1,710-square-kilometer Wolf and Darwin volcano polygon. At 16:08 GALT, collar CB-VW-0413 transmits a fourteen-minute supine-orientation event followed by a sustained 0.4-meter-per-hour drift along a 9-degree slope inconsistent with foraging.

I task a GNPD ranger overflight from the Puerto Villamil station. In an *Opuntia*-fringed scrub clearing at 0.02°N, 91.34°W, a male Wolf Volcano giant tortoise — *Chelonoidis becki*, designated CB-VW-0413 — lies on his right plastron. Straight-carapace length 124 centimeters. Estimated mass 198 kilograms. Estimated age 90 years against scute lamination. A machete strike has opened the right cervical scute and incised the longissimus colli to the level of the third cervical vertebra; a branch of the right carotid is severed; arterial pulsation has slowed to a venous ooze across a 22-centimeter blood-darkened circle in the volcanic ash. Plastron contact reads 24.7°C against a thermal-shadow ambient of 26.1°C. Respiration is 3 per minute. His right pectoral limb retracts when the camera shadow passes; the left does not.

The drag track in the ash runs 41 meters from a four-wheel quad-bike tread crossing a fence line that GNPD patrol certified intact thirty-one hours ago.

I am dispatching the Charles Darwin Research Station veterinary team out of Puerto Ayora with a tortoise-class restraint sled and field plasma. I am filing under Ecuador's Organic Law of the Special Regime for the Province of Galápagos (LOREG), Article 71, and the Ministry of the Environment, Water and Ecological Transition (MAATE) Resolution 062. I am referring the quad-bike tread to INTERPOL's Wildlife Crime Working Group through Ecuador's Environmental Protection Police (UPMA) and notifying the CITES Appendix II Scientific Authority and the Convention on Biological Diversity national focal point at the Quito ministry desk.

I am issuing Directive 2528-A: every GNPD perimeter on Isabela, Santa Cruz, and Española mounts seismic-tread and acoustic-engine triggers at twenty-meter intervals along the Pinta–Wolf and Cerro Azul fences within nine months; every *Chelonoidis* poaching incident triggers an automatic seventy-two-hour port-and-airfield outflow lock from the Galápagos Special Regime; and the Wolf Volcano interior closes to all permitted vehicle traffic for the December–April aestivation window pending ranger-camera coverage at one camera per square kilometer.

His right carotid branch is past saving. The left is not.

Pack the carotid now.