Skip to main content

Say 'aloha!' to this not-actually-extinct Hawaiian flower

[ad_1]


For thousands of years, botany has been firmly rooted in the earth—much like the plants under study. But more recently, the scientific discipline has lifted off.



Last week, researchers at the National Tropical Botanical Garden on the island Kaua'i announced they'd discovered a few thriving members of Hibiscadelphus woodii, officially (and now it seems mistakenly) declared extinct in 2016. The plants—which grow in Kalalau Valley, by all accounts Hawaii's equivalent of the Cliffs of Insanity—were found not by foot, but by drone.


The flower, seen above before its brilliant yellow flowers go wine-darken with age, was formally discovered in 1991 by Ken Wood, a conservation biologist who specializes in the plant life of the Pacific islands. He named it Hibiscadelphus woodii, or Wood's hau kuahiwi, Hawaiian for "snow mountain." The species has long been plagued by habitat loss; human disturbance, invasive species, and diseases threaten plants and animals on island archipelagos around the world. This is particularly troubling, because these species often occur only in one place—the place they are no longer safe—and nowhere else on Earth. Given this particular flower was last seen in 2009, scientists had the sunny relative of the hibiscus listed as extinct in 2016.



But as new drone footage reveals, the species wasn't dead, it was just hiding.


In 2016, the same year the plant was listed extinct, the National Tropical Botanical Garden teamed up with drone operator Ben Nyberg to supplement the work of intrepid scientists like Wood, who rappel down cliffs and trudge through rainforests to conserve plants. In January, National Geographic reports, Nyberg saw what looked like a Hibiscadelphus woodii plant while surveying via drone. (His strategy, the magazine added, combines a methodical "grid system" analysis with "intuition.") The following month, Nyberg and Wood hiked 700 feet into the valley, according to Quartz. Unable to go further, they flew a drone 800 feet deeper into the ravine. The image the drone transmitted back to their portable monitor confirmed their hopes: living Hibiscadelphus woodii plants.



This isn't the first time a species considered extinct has been found again after a long and troubling absence. This year, as Nyberg was flying his drone into the Hawaiian tropics, researchers on Indonesia's North Moluccas island found the world's largest bee species, Megachile pluto, hiding in plain sight. Biologists also found a female Chelonoidis phantasticus, a species of giant tortoise presumed extinct for a century, hiding in the underbrush. And still other researchers scooped up some potential mates for Romeo, recently thought to be the last Sehuencas water frog alive. While these finds are legitimately joyous, three golden Hibiscadelphus woodii can only do so much to illuminate an increasingly dark and depleted natural world.



But, just like a botanist's drone, hope tends to take flight.




[ad_2]

Written By Eleanor Cummins

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ice technicians are the secret stars of the Winter Olympics

[ad_1] The emphasis of this year's two-week-long Winter Olympic Games has been placed squarely on the Olympians themselves. After all, the stated purpose of the international competition is to bring together the world’s greatest athletes in a nail-biting competition across fifteen different winter sports. But before the curlers, skiers, and skaters even arrived in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Olympians of the ice technician world were already a few weeks deep in a competition of their own. Mark Callan of the World Curling Federation and Markus Aschauer of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation both say they’re hoping to make the best ice the Winter Olympics have ever seen. To transform the barren concrete jungle of existing tracks and arenas into an ice- and snow-covered wonderland is an enormous undertaking. And it takes a keen understanding of the physics and chemistry that keeps frozen precipitation pristine. Curling Callan has been making and maintaining ic...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to avoid the mid-movie bathroom break

[ad_1] Long movies and the urge to pee have been linked since the early days of cinema. Sixty-three years before Avengers: Endgame and its three-hour runtime, moviegoers settled in for nearly four hours of The Ten Commandments . “There will be an intermission,” director Cecil B. DeMille announced during the movie’s introduction. And audiences’ bladders were relieved. On average, movies aren’t getting longer, but they also don’t come with a predetermined bathroom break. That means when nature calls, you’ve got to either sit in growing discomfort or gamble on the best time to run to the restroom. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and for most people, setting your body to “do not disturb” is fairly simple. Go before the show The first piece of advice is also the easiest: pee before the movie starts. Generally, healthy adults urinate every 3-4 hours, so the longer a movie runs, the more urgent it becomes to reset your internal p...
Post a Comment
Read more

Charted: Here's how much your food waste hurts the environment

[ad_1] Our species is pretty good at wasting food. Some we discard at the farm for being undersized or oddly shaped. Others we allow to decay in their shipping containers, thrown away before they even reach shelves. We leave even more foodstuffs wasting away in grocery stores, often by letting it sit there until it reaches its sell-by date. As consumers, we don’t have much control over most of the process that brings our food to the grocery store, but we do have control over how much food we personally waste. Let's face it: We’ve all found liquified lettuce in our veggie drawers. Don't fret. It's arguably impossible to consume 100 percent of the food we buy. But a healthy reminder of the effect food waste has on the environment might help us all to be more conscious of the amount of food we eat—and don't eat. Consumer food waste varies extensively depending on the area. In South and Southeast Asia, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that only around ...
Post a Comment
Read more