Date: Wed, 22 May 1996 11:28:25 -1000 (HST)
From: Gary Ray
To: The Why Files
Subject: Re: Hawai`i Endangered Plants

A product of millions of years of evolution in isolation from any continental land mass, the Hawaiian flora is one of the most unique in the world. Approximately 90 percent of the Islands native plants are restricted to Hawai`i. The plant conservation community in Hawai`i currently tracks the status of 604 rare indigenous plant taxa (species, subspecies, & varieties), or 55 percent of the native flora. The main threats to Hawaii's flora are alien weed and insect infestations and destruction by feral ungulates, including wild pigs, goats, deer and sheep. These forces are so great that the millions of dollars spent on habitat conservation in Hawai`i are insufficient to thwart the slide of many plants and animals toward extinction.

Currently, Hawaiian plant conservationists are rallying to save the genes of the most critically endangered plant species. More than 175 species are seriously imperiled with extinction. There are more than 100 plant species with 20 or fewer individuals surviving in the wild!

An initiative is under development by the Center for Plant Conservation -- Hawai`i to sample the remaining gene pools of these plants, and place them in botanical garden or nursery collections, or in-vitro storage in tissue culture laboratories. The program is known as Hawaii's Genetic Safety Net, with total infrastructure costs estimated at more than $1 million and operational costs at $750 thousand per year. A consortium of 15 public- and private-sector organizations at the federal, state and local levels is involved in this urgent program to prevent any further genetic extinction within Hawaii's flora.

Reintroduction and recovery of species in natural habitat is the ultimate goal of conservation. Yet few Hawaiian plants have been successfully reintroduced, due to the fact that their natural habitats have not yet been secured from threats of exotic species invasions. These threats account for much of the delay in scheduling plant reintroduction projects. An exception to the rule, is Cyanea pinnatifida, an extremely rare lobelioid down to a single, non-flowering individual in 1994. Tissue samples were extracted from the surviving individual and were successfully grown to a flowering adult by Dr. Greg Koob at the Lyon Arboretums Micropropagation Laboratory in Honolulu. Reintroduction of this species was completed recently in a forest reserve managed by The Nature Conservancy.