<
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/11/botanists-decode-secret-life-of-rare-plants-to-ensure-reintroduction-success/>
"It was 2006 and Ismail Ebrahim, a botanist with the South African National
Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), was worried. While surveying one of the last
remaining patches of renosterveld shrubland in South Africa’s Paarl region,
near Cape Town, he and his team of citizen scientists found a small,
yellow-flowered daisy species:
Marasmodes undulata.
It had long been thought extinct, with the last 200-strong population observed
at the same location near the town of Paarl in the 1980s. Now, Ebrahim’s team
had discovered an even smaller population, numbering just 27 individuals.
The citizen scientists had to act quickly to stave off species oblivion.
Competing vegetation was choking out the small daisies, so Ebrahim’s team took
the calculated risk of setting fire to the site to level the playing field and
stimulate seedling growth for the fire-adapted daisy.
But no
M. undulata reappeared at first, and those popping up in subsequent
years disappeared. “Every time we went back to the site, we found less plants,”
Ebrahim recalls.
Why put so much focus on conserving a diminutive shrubland flower? Among the
diverse inhabitants of the renosterveld, few species are more easily overlooked
than
M. undulata, which botanist Donovan Kirkwood, the curator of the
Stellenbosch University Botanical Garden affectionately called the “ugly
duckling daisy” before his untimely death in August. But just like other
renosterveld plants,
M. undulata belongs there, forming part of an ecosystem
that becomes more sensitive to collapse with every species that is lost. Like a
Jenga tower block, the little daisy helps keep the broader whole intact.
Starting in 2019, Ebrahim and his team took further action to prevent
extinction. Using a batch of seeds botanists had collected decades earlier,
they tried to raise and propagate the daisy. If the reintroduction was
successful, they hoped
M. undulata could be brought back from the brink. But
only time would tell."
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-unstoppable-development-of-european-subway/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
