Extinct Wildflower Found In California

Del writes "A Berkeley graduate student found the pink wildflower Eriogonom truncatum, known as the Mount Diablo buckwheat. The flower hasn't been seen for 70 years and has been rediscovered on the flanks of Mount Diablo in Contra Costa County."

Comments

Re:He found a *flower*

[Reene]

So what, botany nerds/geeks don't count?

Re:He found a *flower*

[Anonymous Coward]

"When I took people out to see it, they just walked right by it," Park said. "They couldn't grok that the thing could be so small and dainty."

News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.

Same flower?

[FriedTurkey]

How do we know that the original flower isn't still extinct? A new flower could have evolved back to look like the extinct flower. There is nothing in the article about testing it with a 70 year old sample.

Re:Same flower?

[DrinkingIllini]

Somehow I don't see evolution doing the job in 70 years, that's pretty quick, even for a small plant and the odds of tracing the exact same evolutionary path twice are quite daunting. Especially in the case where apparently this flower had not much of an evolutionary advantage to begin with, as it was believed to be extinct

Was it rediscovered OR did it re-evolve?

[Senor_Programmer]

Life evolves to fill holes in ecology.
The time scales are seldom conceivable in human terms, because they are long relative to human attention span in some cases and lifetime in others. However, in the end life always evolves to fill holes in the ecology. It's the holes that come and go. Wrap your mind around this like you did the concept of holes in electronics ;-)

Just because some particular life has evolved away (become extinct) doesn't mean that it can't come back given the right conditions. It might come back in a little bit different form. Fossil records don't show continuity of existance, only evolving form. How the hell do we puny humans know, in our quick as a wink relative to evolution of life time, that this is NOT a natural process in evolution?

Come on all you natural philosphers. What do you say?

Re:Was it rediscovered OR did it re-evolve?

[Anonymous Coward]

"How the hell do we puny humans know [...] that this is NOT a natural process in evolution?"
You mean like exactly the same flower evolved to fill in what you call a "hole"? You're like I.D.-ers, you've almost grasped it but still waaaay wrong.

Re:Was it rediscovered OR did it re-evolve?

[SubtleNuance]

Just because some particular life has evolved away (become extinct) doesn't mean that it can't come back given the right conditions

I have two problems with this.

1) It suggests that HUMANS arnt responsible for mass modern extinction, just 'changes in the holes'. Thats nonsense. We are destroying the natural world, in such a way that we are removing these niches that plants and animals formerly occupied.

2) once a plant is gone it doesnt 'rematerialize'. Its genetic advantages are lost forever. in the case of this flower, it didnt just 're-appear in a jiffy' to fill the old niche. it A) probably existed all along or B) formerly dormant seeds germinated and multiplied.

What didnt happen is one plant, sensing the niche vacant, didnt 'give birth' to the SAME species as had been extinct.

Its the same flower. not a newly created flower the same as the old one (?) or someshiat.

Re:Was it rediscovered OR did it re-evolve?

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not suggest that humans are not responsible for extinctions. Only that their puny brains can't grasp the dynamic of life and the time scales involved. Their difficulty with time is both in relation to human lifetime AND in relation to human attention span.

I did not say that a plant rematerializes, What happens is competition for a niche favors specialization in the same plants which specialized to fill it before. Identical? Not likely. Better suited, most definitely because the environment is not exactly the same as it was before.

I have a problem with the anthropromorphism. Plants don't 'sense' ecological niches. They compete with those in the most similar niche having the greatest advantage.

Eriogonum (wild buckwheat) is a common plant with wide diversification. It is not inconceivable that a nearby (in terms of morphology, location, and environmenta requirements) cousin did not fill the spot opened by rabbits.

Isn't it strange that 'non-native'grasses catch the blame for 'extinction' rather than a cessation of annual burning by native americans...both of which are non-native!

No, blame man for messing with nature rather than accepting that he is part of it. Dolphins get the joke, that's why they are always smiling.

Just goes to show

[SimianOverlord]

I imagine plants must be incredibly difficult to "declare extinct", after all - how would you show for sure that none are present in a country the size of America? Whilst plants may seem to be local to a specific area because of their preference for a certain type of soil, pH or shade, it doesn't follow that, because the ones you know about are dead, then the plant is extinct. It's too easy to rush to judgement, especially when environmentalists have an interest in declaring loudly how many species are threatened or are already extinct. After reading "A State Of Fear" recently, and whilst I haven't fallen for all of Crichtons selective misrepresentations, I suspect their motivations a bit more than I used to.

What are the chances?

[aziraphale]

I find it amazing that, of all the places that Mount Diablo Buckwheat should turn up, it'd be on the slopes of Mount Diablo.

It's funny nobody thought of looking there before...

I don't see the problem with extinctions.

[Colin Smith]

Extinction is the history of the earth. If a species is unsuitable for it's environment it dies out and is replaced by something else. Contrary to popular belief, no species has a right to exist.

It would only concern me if key species that humans depend on were dying out.

Re:I don't see the problem with extinctions.

[hey!]

Contrary to popular belief, no species has a right to exist.

How you frame a problem determines your policies and actions. This is the most incredibly misguided way of looking at this issue imaginable.

What we are talking about can be framed in terms of human welfare, in the short, mid and long term.

The loss of species is a loss of information; not just the information that is contained in the germ plasm, protein and anatomical structures, but information that is inherent in how that species fits into the ecological systems it has evolved. The relationship is two way -- loss of species decreases the information in the systems it is embedded in, loss of systems complexity leads to loss of speices.

Leaving aside issues of bioprospecting, you might ask what this has to do with human welfare? The answer is, a lot. When species composition changes, ecosystems find a whole new set of equilibria. Sometimes this benefits people, sometimes it hurts. More often it hurts because the opportunistic species are seldom economically valuable, and in many cases pose the potential for harm.

I'll give you a concrete example that covers both these cases. A friend of mine's family own an island, that has been in the family for well over a hundred years. Up until the 1980s, humans were the only major predators on the island, which meant there was a large deer herd -- a good thing. On the other hand, there was a large population of small rodents like meadow voles. The deer population is kept somewhat in check by human predation, but there is no such check on the rodent population. Since everything must be in the end food for something else, this meant dieases organisms and parasites: Borrelia spirochetes and ticks on the scale of a biblical plague. As a result, his family has had a decades long history of health problems: palsy, myalgia, fatigue, join pain etc., that was unexplainable until 1975. Lyme disease.

Shortly after the rediscovery of Lyme disease, it also happened that the Eastern Coyote made it out to the island. As a result the deer herd dropped, which was bad, but the population of rodents and ticks crashed as well. You can now visit the island for a week or more, tramp through the grass and woods and not find a single tick. The thing is, the coyote is filling in ecological niche that was formerly filled by wolves, extinct in this range for centuries. In fact Eastern Coyotes are relatively more wolf-like than their wester cousins, all the better to take the mantle of number one top tier predator.

It may well be the case that the reason that Lyme disease was so poorly characterized before, and so common now, can be explained by the biological impovershment of suburban and non-old growth forests.

Similar issues surround hanta virus and other "emergent" infectious agents. Why do the emerge? Well, they emerge because human progress is not undertaken with sufficient sophistication to minimize unintended consequences. People get their nose bent out of shape because they'd rather not think that their actions have unintended consequences. Well, in the long term and maybe not so long term, knowing the consequences of your actions is smart.

Re:I don't see the problem with extinctions.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't expect wildlife to evolve to defend against bulldozers and bullets. And I do believe it is right to try to preserve them for posterity. It is for the same reason that we try to protect different languages, culture, historical buildings etc. etc.

You're just not trying hard enough here to understand the complexity of evolutionary theory. It's much more insidious than you might believe.

Absolutely you can, and should, expect wildlife to evolve to defend against "bulldozers and bullets". It's doing so right now! What do I mean?

Humans (like yourself, it would seem) care about preserving certain wildlife species because it might potentially benefit their own existence, and take steps to do so. It's nice to think of it as altruism, but more than likely it isn't quite so unselfish. They recognize that they and other life exist in a symbiotic relationship.

These particular "protected" wildlife species, through their own careful evolution, have evolved to be "useful" to humans. Those that haven't are in danger of dying out as humans become an increasingly significant part of the equation.

By compelling humans by various means to defend them, the wildlife species in question have proven their own fitness in the very precarious selection context of the twenty-first century.

Re:I don't see the problem with extinctions.

[sfjoe]

Contrary to popular belief, no species has a right to exist. ... including homo sapiens.

Before you so blithely dismiss extinction, let me pass along an analogy the late Carl Sagan used to use. Our earth is like an airplane and each one of the species is a rivet in the airplane. Losing a few here or there makes no discernible difference. A rivet may be lost in the natural course of events and then can be replaced. If humans begin casually popping rivets out, however, there will eventually be a big problem. One moment the airplane is fine and, at some point, one too many rivets are removed and we have catastrophic failure.

Re:News Update

[operagost]

You must be kidding! This is California. Most likely, environmentalists would displace all residents within 100 miles of a buckwheat plant and raze their homes to make sure it isn't threatened. Next, they'll lobby for a "Mount Diablo Buckwheat Awareness Week" and "Mount Diablo Sensitivity Training" in all grade schools and corporations.

Re:hmm

[monkeydo]

It would seem that the scientists may have had something to do with it's extinction.

First reported in 1862, there are only seven historical records of the plant, the last in 1936, when Bowerman, one of the first women to receive a Ph.D. in botany from UC Berkeley, collected a sample from Mount Diablo.

So the last reported sighting of this plant was 70 years ago when a botanist picked some. And then apparantly didn't extract any seeds, or plant it in a garden. Hoorray for preservation!