A Galapagos endemic that lost the ability to fly and swims down to feed on the bottom with stubby ragged wings.
This is a bird, not a mammal, and the site files it here for want of a better place. Between 89 and 100 cm and 2.5 to 5 kg, which makes it the largest cormorant alive. Blackish-brown above and browner below, with turquoise eyes, a long heavy hooked bill, and thick legs set far back on the body.
The wings are the obvious thing. They are about a third of the area a bird this size would need to fly, and they look ragged and stubby. Nothing else in Galapagos looks like it. At a distance on the surface it could be taken for a Galapagos penguin, but the penguin is black and white with a short bill.
Underwater it does not fly with its wings the way penguins and other cormorants do. It holds the wings tight against the body and drives itself with both feet kicking together, using the long neck to take octopus, eels and small fish out of holes in the rock. It works the bottom in a few metres of water within about 200 m of shore, then surfaces to swallow. No maximum dive depth has been published.
It breeds only on Fernandina and the north and west coasts of Isabela, so a diver in the central or eastern islands will not see one. The population is somewhere between about 1,000 and 1,700 birds depending on the count and the year; it fell to around 400 after the 1983 El Niño and recovered. It is listed as vulnerable. Park rules require a distance of 2 m and no touching.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.