• Lost South American wildflower named 'ex

    From ScienceDaily@1:317/3 to All on Friday, April 15, 2022 22:30:40
    Lost South American wildflower named 'extinctus' rediscovered (but still endangered)

    Date:
    April 15, 2022
    Source:
    Field Museum
    Summary:
    This South American wildflower was presumed extinct -- to the point
    that its official scientific name is Gasteranthus extinctus. But
    now, scientists are reporting the first confirmed sightings in 40
    years. This not only means that this one little flower made it,
    but that an important concept in conservation biology called
    Centinelan extinction needs to be re-examined.



    FULL STORY ========================================================================== Scientific names get chosen for lots of reasons -- they can honor an
    important person, or hint at what an organism looks like or where it's
    from. For a tropical wildflower first described by scientists in 2000,
    the scientific name "extinctus" was a warning. The orange wildflower
    had been found 15 years earlier in an Ecuadorian forest that had since
    been largely destroyed; the scientists who named it suspected that by
    the time they named it, it was already extinct. But in a new paper
    in PhytoKeys, researchers report the first confirmed sightings of
    Gasteranthus extinctusin 40 years.


    ========================================================================== "Extinctus was given its striking name in light of the extensive
    deforestation in western Ecuador," says Dawson White, a postdoctoral
    researcher at Chicago's Field Museum and co-lead author of the paper. "But
    if you claim something's gone, then no one is really going to go out and
    look for it anymore. There are still a lot of important species that are
    still out there, even though overall, we're in this age of extinction."
    The rediscovered plant is a small forest floor-dweller with flamboyant
    neon- orange flowers. "The genus name, Gasteranthus, is Greek for
    'belly flower.' Their flowers have a big pouch on the underside with
    a little opening top where pollinators can enter and exit," says White.

    G. extinctus is found in the foothills of the Andes mountains, where
    the land flattens to a plane that was once covered in cloud forest. The
    region, called the Centinela Ridge, is notorious among biologists for
    being home to a unique set of plants that vanished when its forests
    were almost completely destroyed in the 1980s. The late biologist
    E. O. Wilson even named the phenomenon of organisms instantly going
    extinct when their small habitat is destroyed "Centinelan extinction."
    The story of Centinela was also an alarm to draw attention to the fact
    that over 97% of the forests in the western half of Ecuador have been
    felled and converted to farmland. What remains is a fine mosaic of tiny
    islands of forest within a sea of bananas and a handful of other crops.

    "Centinela is a mythical place for tropical botanists," says Pitman. "But because it was described by the top people in the field, no one really
    double- checked the science. No one went back to confirm that the
    forest was gone and those things were extinct." But around the time
    that Gasteranthus extinctus was first described in 2000, scientists were already showing that some victims of Centinelan extinction weren't really extinct. Since 2009, a few scientists have mounted expeditions looking
    for G. extinctus was still around, but they weren't successful. But when
    White and Pitman received funding from the Field Museum's Women's Board to visit the Centinela Ridge, the team had a chance to check for themselves.



    ========================================================================== Starting in the summer of 2021, they began combing through satellite
    images trying to identify primary rainforest that was still intact
    (which was difficult, White recalls, because most of the images of
    the region were obscured by clouds). They found a few contenders and
    assembled a team of ten botanists from six different institutions in
    Ecuador, the US, and France, including Juan Guevara, Thomas Couvreur,
    Nicola's Zapata, Xavier Cornejo, and Gonzalo Rivas. In November of 2021,
    they arrived at Centinela.

    "It was my first time planning an expedition where we weren't sure we'd
    even enter a forest," says Pitman. "But as soon as we got on the ground we found remnants of intact cloud forest, and we spotted G. extinctus on the
    first day, within the first couple hours of searching. We didn't have a
    photo to compare it to, we only had images of dried herbarium specimens,
    a line drawing, and a written description, but we were pretty sure that
    we'd found it based on its poky little hairs and showy "pot-bellied"
    flowers." Pitman recalls mixed emotions upon the team finding the
    flower. "We were really excited, but really tentative in our excitement
    -- we thought, 'Was it really that easy?'" he says. "We knew we needed
    to check with a specialist." The researchers took photos and collected
    some fallen flowers, not wanting to harm the plants if they were the
    only ones remaining on Earth. They sent the photos to taxonomic expert
    John Clark, who confirmed that, yes, the flowers were the not-so-extinct
    G. extinctus. Thankfully, the team found many more individuals as they
    visited other forest fragments, and they collected museum specimens to
    voucher the discovery and leaves for DNA analysis. The team was also
    able to validate some unidentified photos posted on the community science
    app iNaturalist as also being G. extinctus.

    The plant will keep its name, says Pitman, because biology's code of nomenclature has very specific rules around renaming an organism, and G.

    extinctus's resurrection doesn't make the cut.

    While the flower remains highly endangered, the expedition found plenty
    of reasons for hope, the researchers say.

    "We walked into Centinela thinking it was going to break our heart, and
    instead we ended up falling in love," says Pitman. "Finding G. extinctus
    was great, but what we're even more excited about is finding some
    spectacular forest in a place where scientists had feared everything
    was gone." The team is now working with Ecuadorian conservationists
    to protect some of the remaining fragments where G. extinctus and the
    rest of the spectacular Centinelan flora lives on. "Rediscovering this
    flower shows that it's not too late to turn around even the worst-case biodiversity scenarios, and it shows that there's value in conserving
    even the smallest, most degraded areas," says White. "It's an important
    piece of evidence that it's not too late to be exploring and inventorying plants and animals in the heavily degraded forests of western Ecuador. New species are still being found, and we can still save many things that
    are on the brink of extinction."

    ========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Field_Museum. Note: Content may be
    edited for style and length.


    ========================================================================== Journal Reference:
    1. Nigel C. A. Pitman, Dawson M. White, Juan Ernesto Guevara Andino,
    Thomas
    L. P. Couvreur, Riley P. Fortier, Jose' Nicola's Zapata, Xavier
    Cornejo, John L. Clark, Kenneth J. Feeley, Mark K. Johnston,
    Alix Lozinguez, Gonzalo Rivas-Torres. Rediscovery of
    Gasteranthus extinctus L.E.Skog & L.P.Kvist (Gesneriaceae) at
    multiple sites in western Ecuador.

    PhytoKeys, 2022; 194: 33 DOI: 10.3897/phytokeys.194.79638 ==========================================================================

    Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220415100547.htm

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