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

The headline is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not really extinct. It can be found in California.

Re:The headline is wrong

[Kinky Bass Junk]

"The Flower Previously Known as 'Extinct'"
Would be a much radder headline.

Re:The headline is wrong

[eclectro]

It's not really extinct. It can be found in California.

No, submitter is right. By time you read the headline everybody will have been out to get one for themselves. It is indeed extinct now.

It was doomed anyway by global warming and whatnot.

Re:The headline is wrong

[jimi the hippie]

Dateline California: Experts crap their pants when they discover the Mt Diablo Buckwheat growing on the side of Mt Diablo. To quote one horticologist, "We thought it was extinct, afterall in the previous 70 years we have not discovered a single one. Then all of a sudden our intern Steve suggested looking around its namesake mountain. Low and behold it was there after all, you should have seen the look on my face when I had to pay Steve that 20 bucks I bet him."

Re:The headline is wrong

[TRS80NT]

Good point, jimi. What are the odds of finding Mt. Diablo buckwheat ON Mt. Diablo? It's like what were the odds of Lou Gehrig getting Lou Gehrig's Disease.

Re:The headline is wrong

[dapyx]

That would be real-life slashdotting

Re:The headline is wrong

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Does that mean that we slashdoted the flower? ;-)

This just in

[el_womble]

In a rare interview Eriogonom truncatum states "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."

"Extinct"

[gowen]

You keep using that word, and I don't think it means what you think it does. This flower is self-evidently not extinct.

Clue : the phrase you're looking for is "Wildflower previously thought extinct".

Why is this news for nerds?

[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."

Oh.

Is there anything we can do?

[Council]

Oh my God.

Following a different routine from his normal survey, he stumbled across the plants - about 20 in all - in full bloom

We must hope that these 20 are the only ones. I hope that they'll move quickly enough to wipe out this terrible scourge once and for all.

"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."

We never see these horrors coming because deep down, we're just too good to imagine these things growing in our own backyards. We've been blind for too long.

"It was very exciting, and I've spent a few weeks being stunned over this thing," he said. "But I'll be glad when it's over."

We all will, Michael, we all will. Our thoughts and prayers are with you and your family.

"At this point, it is really tenuous. Here, it's still hanging on by its fingernails, and the publicity alone could be enough to wipe it out again."

We can only pray.

Oh the irony

[Adrilla]

Then the ivory-billed woodpecker thought to also be extinct ate it.

keep it up

[poor_boi]

1 down, 831 to go.

Quick!

[bigmouth_strikes]

Someone make this a geocache spot so we can stampede it into extinction once and for all!

Re:He found a *flower*

[Reene]

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

hmm

[davidmcg]

It is now extinct again when scientists picked it and realised they couldn't keep it alive by putting into a glass of water.

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.

Re:Just goes to show

[abb3w]

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?

Not to mention, how many seeds still are scattered that might yet someday germinate?

Re:He found a *flower*

[hey!]

Hey, I'm raising my kids to be geeks. Oh, they like computers, that goes without saying. But I'm teaching them to like biology too. Instead of teaching them to react with fear and revulsion when they see I spider, I have them look closely and count the number of pairs of eyes they can find. Once we found a daring jumping spider (Phidippus audax) in our garden. This spider is really cool. It's very active because it chases it's prey, leaping on it and killing it with it's chelicerae (fangs), which are a shiny metallic green. One of my entomologist geek friends (who likes other arthopods too), tells me they make good pets.

Nature is cool, and I don't want them to miss out. But I also have an ulterior motive. Informatics was a great field to work in in the late 20th century. It still is. But the most exciting field in this century is going to be biology and its applications.

Re:He found a *flower*

[hey!]

Please tell us more facts about the future.

Sure, no problem. Here's a couple:

You still aren't going to be able to buy a flying car. You will, however, be able to invest in a company which intends to build one.

Some time between 2015 to 2025, expect the cadre of kids now in pre-school to adopt a musical style that current fans of rap will find incomprehensible and offsensive.

Perhaps they can be used to ensure that our kids don't have to work at all...

Well, by the standards of my grandparents and even my parents, what I do hardly counts as work, because it doesn't involve the daily risk of death and dismemberment and is not brutally punishing on my body. I expect that by my grandchildren's time, work will look like hanging around in coffee shop and chatting.

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.

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:Whoa!

[kfg]

I'd say thats a bigger discovery.. a fly that looks like a bee!

A bit late for that:

Bee Fly

You can tell it looks like a bee because it's fat and fuzzy, unlike the insect in the flower picture, but here's one that looks like a wasp:

Wasp Fly

Sorry, but science has already been there and done that.

KFG

Re:In other news...

[Call Me Black Cloud]

In other other news, studies show that any guy using "grok" as part of his normal vocabulary will not have a girlfriend.

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.

The headline is right

[rumblin'rabbit]

No, it's extinct

And delicious (burp).