Chile Fights to Save World's Rarest Plant
9/9/96
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Headline: Chile Fights to Save World's Rarest Plant
Source: Reuters
Date: 9/9/96
Byline: Roger Atwood
Copyright 1996 by Reuters
ISLA ROBINSON CRUSOE, Chile (Reuter) - As plants go, it
doesn't look like anything special -- droopy, elongated leaves
and tiny yellow-white flowers.
What makes Dendroseris neriifolia so unusual and the object
of so much study is that there is only one known specimen living
in the wild. It is the world's rarest plant and, like scores of
other species on rugged Robinson Crusoe island, it somehow
survives literally on the precipice of extinction on this speck
of land lost in the South Pacific.
Known to a few travel connoisseurs as the place where the
real-life Robinson Crusoe was marooned in the 18th century, the
island attracts naturalists who come to study what is believed
to be the world's largest number of endemic plant species per
square mile. There are 124 unique plant species -- occurring
nowhere else on earth -- on an island of a mere 36 square miles.
For the people who run the national park covering the
island, it is a daily struggle to defend the plants against
scourges like rabbits and goats brought centuries ago by Spanish
sailors and foreign plants ranging from blackberry bushes to
eucalyptus trees that crowd out native vegetation.
``The ecology here is in constant crisis,'' national park
administrator Ivan Leiva said. ``People who lived here over the
years had no concept of the idea of ecological balance. So we
have all these plagues that alter the balance radically.''
Leiva tends a few saplings of Dendroseris neriifolia in his
garden in the island's only village, San Juan Bautista, as part
of a last-ditch effort to save the tree from extinction. Its
only known wild specimen grows in a remote ravine on the
island's eastern end, an area almost inaccessible due to its
sheer cliffs.
A few others have not been so lucky. At least two unique
plant species are known to have gone extinct, including an
aromatic sandalwood last seen in the 1930s, and 61 are listed
as ``in imminent danger of extinction.''
``There may be other unique species living on the island
that we don't even know about. Parts of it are so rugged and so
isolated that we cannot reach them,'' Leiva said.
Some plants were thought to be extinct for years only to be
rediscovered on some remote cliffside or mountaintop, while
others probably went extinct before anyone discovered them.
Except for a few plentiful native species, any of the island's
plants could be eaten into extinction at any time by the rabbits
and wild goats that infest the place.
``Some of these plants have only three or four specimens
left. Suppose some goat eats them before we can collect some
seeds. The plant is finished, extinct, gone forever,'' said
Guillermo Araya, a forest ranger and island native.
A Dutch-financed conservation program is helping, but park
officials say their struggle against extinction is stalled by a
lack of support from Chilean authorities in the capital,
Santiago. They point to Ecuador's Galapagos Islands as an
example of the sort of aggressive, government-led conservation
drive they would like to see for their island.
The problem is rare plants do not attract international
donors the way whales and giant tortoises do in the Galapagos,
and anyway the island is always overshadowed by a much more
famous Chilean islet, Easter Island, about 3,000 miles
away.
``The base of any environment is the plants. But let's face
it, you can get money for saving bears or whales or birds, not
for saving plants,'' Leiva said. ``Look at what they've done in
the Galapagos. The people living there became aware of the need
to conserve the environment thanks to the government's
efforts.''
The island also has two unique hummingbird species and a
unique seal, the Juan Fernandez seal, which resurged from
near-extinction in the 19th century and now breeds by the
thousands in the island's rocky coves and a few nearby islets.
The island's main claim to fame continues to be Robinson
Crusoe -- or rather, Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who
asked to be left on the then-uninhabited island when his ship
called in 1704. After four years surviving on wild goats, he was
rescued by a passing ship and found his way home to Scotland
where he became a celebrity.
Daniel Defoe heard about his story and fictionalized it in
the novel ``Robinson Crusoe,'' which Defoe set in the Caribbean.
About 500 people live on the island now, all in San Juan
Bautista, and Leiva says he would like to turn every one of them
into a conservationist. He has put a bounty on rabbits, with
special prizes for people who catch more than 100, and works to
convince villagers that rabbit stew is quite tasty.
``But it's very difficult,'' he said. ``People just aren't
used to thinking of rabbits and goats as a plague.''