elephants to swim across ocean gaps, using the
trunk as a sort of snorkel. It had been generally
assumed that this behaviour was beyond the ability
or, if not the ability, then the inclinations of ele-
phants. Thus, the existence of elephants on an
island was formerly taken to be proof of a former
land connection. As we discuss in the next section,
the increasing application of modern phylogeo-
graphical methods is gradually bringing improved
resolution to such matters.
Macaronesia—the biogeographical affinities of the Happy Islands
From the beginning of the nineteenth century it was
already evident to the European naturalists who
called in at what we now term the Macaronesian
islands in the course of their transatlantic voyaging,
that these islands possessed an interrelated biota.
The term Macaronesia (derived from the classic
Greek macarionislands and nesoihappy) was
first used by the British botanist Philip Barker Webb
in 1845, with reference to the Canaries (in turn fol-
lowing their Roman name Insulae Fortunatae;
Stearn 1973). Today, however, the term is more
broadly utilized for the designation of a biogeo-
graphical entity including all the north-west
Atlantic archipelagoes off the European and North
African coasts, thus comprising the Azores,
Madeira with the Salvage Islands, the Canaries,
and the Cape Verde Islands (Fig. 3.9). To the initial
core formed by these archipelagos, some authors
have suggested adding a narrow coastal strip of the
African continent, extending approximately from
Agadir (Morocco) to Nouadhibou (Mauritania),
including the valleys and wadis (dry riverbeds) of
the Anti-Atlas mountain chain (Sunding 1979).
With the exception of the Azores, where the vol-
canic activity relates to the Mid-Atlantic ocean
ridge, the origins of the Macaronesian islands lie
within the African plate. Their formation began
perhaps 80 Ma, gradually building the submarine
platforms for the East Canarian and Salvage
Islands. Their emergence above sea level began
some 27 Ma in the Salvage Islands, which today are
almost completely eroded back to sea level. Later,
the Canaries (from 20 Ma) and Madeira (15 Ma)
emerged as the nucleus of the region (Central
Macaronesia), and finally the southern and north-
ern archipelagos, the Cape Verde and Azorean
archipelagoes, arose some 10 and 8 Ma, respec-
tively. Eruptions in recent decades attest to the
active nature of these volcanic systems (e.g.
Capelinhos, Faial in the Azores in 1957; Teneguía,
La Palma in the Canaries in 1971; and Caldeira do
Pico, Fogo, in the Cape Verde archipelago in 1995).
The Macaronesian archipelagoes range across a
considerable latitudinal (40N (Corvo, Azores) to
15 N (Brava, Cape Verde), and climatic gradient,
from the cool-oceanic climate of the Azores to the
oceanic tropical monsoon-drift climate of the Cape
Verde islands, with the Mediterranean climates of
Madeira and the Canaries in between (Lüpnitz 1995,
Fernández-Palacios and Dias 2001). Moreover, the
distances from the African and European mainlands
vary hugely. For example, only 96 km separates
Fuerteventura (Canaries) and Stafford Point60 THE BIOGEOGRAPHY OF ISLAND LIFE
AzoresMadeiraSalvageCanariesMACARONESIACape VerdeFigure 3.9The biogeographical area known as Macaronesia
consists of the island groups as shown and a narrow coastal strip of
north-west Africa (after García–Talavera 1999). The affinities with the
Iberian peninsula are also recognized by some as warranting a link to
the peninsula.