In 2016, two biologists signed the death certificate for two species of rare plants that once grew in the lush forests of New Caledonia. First recorded and collected in the 1860s by French naval surgeon and botanist Émile Deplanche, the flowering shrub, Pycnandra longiflora, produced a beautiful bicoloured flower of deep red and sunshine yellow.
It was noted from just a single location on the South Pacific island, known simply as “Gatope”. The samples made their long and arduous journey back to the natural history collections of Europe where, along with a whole menagerie of zoological and botanical specimens, they were filed away. After that, no-one set eyes on the plant – or its wonderful bloom – for over a century.
Welcome to Gatope
This was not for want of trying. Jérôme Munzinger, from the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement in Marseille scoured the forests of New Caledonia in search of this long-lost plant, returning, along with colleagues, to where he thought it may first have been collected, the Gatope Peninsular. Ever hopeful that they would once again rediscover this missing shrub, the researcher relentlessly collected hundreds and hundreds of plants, dreaming that at least one of them would belong to Pycnandra longiflora. But despite hours spent sweating in the heat, trekking through the vegetation, and recording every Pycnandra they thought might – just might – be the fabled plant, they came up empty. All samples belonged to other closely related species.
The scientists were hindered by the poor record keeping of those early Victorian collectors. Rather than giving each sample a unique collecting number, many were numbered by the species they were thought to belong to. This has given rise to huge amounts of confusion, particularly where multiple species were thought to be just one. This muddle was only deepened as it is now thought that the locations given where not necessarily where the specimens were collected, but rather the nearest military camp in the region. Even today, biologists are still trying to unravel this mess.
And so it was with a heart as heavy as lead that the botanists had to admit that Pycnandra longiflora was most likely no more. One hundred and fifty years after its discovery it was declared extinct, along with another plant of its genus. Yet this swan song of the missing plant did not go unheard. After reading the paper mourning the loss of the flower, amateur botanist Rosa Scopetra put together a package, and sent it to Munzinger.
You’ve got mail
Once receiving the parcel, the botanist opened it to find two things. The first was USB stick full of photos of a species known as Eugenia plurinervia, which as luck would have it Munzinger had just described the year before, and was already thought to be threatened. The second item in the box, however, stopped the botanist dead in his tracks. It was the flowers of a plant that had not been seen by scientists since the 1860s. It turned out that Scopetra had been keeping tabs on the long-lost Pyncnandra longiflora as well, and on reading Munzingers article on its extinction thought otherwise. Just a year after its extinction, the flower had been rediscovered!
The fresh flowers were able to give the researcher information not discernible from the century and half old specimens in the archives. To start with, this was the first time scientists had seen the full and riotous colour of what have now been described as “the largest and the most beautiful flowers in the entire genus.”
After discovering out where exactly Scopetra found the plant, there was little wonder that it had remained hidden all these years. While the plants were growing only 600 metres from the side of a road, they were found to grow to an average height of just 1.7 metres tall. When surrounded by other vegetation, this makes the rare plant particularly easy to overlook, particularly considering the species is restricted to a tiny area.
Following Scopetra’s direction, the botanist was able to find only 176 of the plants from two separate regions covering a combined area of just 0.6 square kilometres. These two small patches contain all the known individuals of Pyncnandra longiflora in the world, downgrading it from Extinct to Critically Endangered, but also posing a significant problem.
Not out of the woods
The entire population of the shrub could quite easily be wiped out by just a single wildfire. Yet an even bigger threat came from people. If the forest is cleared, for example, it wouldn’t take much to destroy all the remaining plants. But botanist are currently even more concerned about mining. The plants grow on a type of soil known as ultramafic substrate, prized in New Caledonia as being rich in desirable and profitable metals such as cobalt and nickel. In fact, there is already a mining concession nearby, and even just the widening of the road to increase access to these mines could be enough to plunge the plants straight back into extinction.
Botanists hope that the rediscovery of Pycnandra longiflora, a flowering shrub found nowhere else on Earth, could be a good thing for the region. It is found alongside a handful of other rare plants, drastically increasing the conservation value of the area and bolstering arguments to give it full protection.
It also provides hope – and a host of information about what to look for and where it may live – that Pycnandra longiflora, as well as other plants not seen since those early expeditions, might survive in other undocumented places on New Caledonia.
References
- Munzinger J., Swenson U. (2016) Pycnandra longiflora (Sapotaceae) a species believed to be extinct, rediscovered in New Caledonia. Phytotaxa 278, 176-180.
- Munzinger J., Swenson U. (2015) Revision of Pycnandra subgenus Leptostylis and description of subgenus Wagapensia (Sapotaceae), a genus endemic to New Caledonia. Australian Systematic Botany 28, 91-110.
- Morat P. (2010) Les botanistes récolteurs en Nouvelle-Calédonie de 1774 à 2005. Adansonia 32, 159-217.
- Pierre A.-H., Le Moguédec G., Lowry P.P., Munzinger J. (2014) Multivariate morphometric analysis and species delimitation in the endemic New Caledonian genus Storthocalyx (Sapindaceae). Bot J Linn Soc 176, 127-146.
- Platt J.R. (2016) What's in the Box? A Long-Lost Species. Scientific American. Available at : https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/box-lost-species/.
