Dit verhaal. En dat vond ik wel de moeite waard.
quote:
I collect and grow rare palms trees and exotic tropical plants. The collector community around these things tends to be fairly eccentric and wealthy, because getting enough land to grow stuff, in tropical regions, where you also have things like electricity and stable government, generally also means really expensive.
A lot of the native places where these plants are from are still not very well-marked or explored, and having a specimen of a new, undiscovered species can be the difference between owning a bunch of $50 plants, and a bunch of $5,000 ones. At the same time, there is a lot of visual variation even within a single species, and plants hybridize and stay able to reproduce across species very easily. So the usual taxonomy lines are pretty blurry.
The result is a lot of very contentious, high stakes arguments over whether certain differences constitute a new species, or just a local variation. The final word can usually be determined by a microscopic analysis of the plant’s flowers, but given it can take some of these trees 30+ years to flower, that’s not always feasible.
The lack of access to the places where the plants are native (say, a remote valley in Madagascar or in the Andes at 6000 feet, where less than 30 adult plants remain) plus the money and fame involved in finding and proving you own a new species, results in absolutely crazy, expensive, dramatic adventures by rich old guys in their 60s and 70s renting helicopters and dodging authoritarian government border guards and customs/agriculture enforcers as they swoop through the jungle, repel down cliffs, and gather seeds before smuggling them out again in the dead of night.
And then the ensuing legal drama over who found what first, who gets to name the species after themselves, who broke what law to do it, attempts to sabotage each others’ claims, and appeals to “canon” taxonomy sources like Kew, etc. gets hilariously epic.
So, the recent drama:
About 10-15 years ago, one of these guys discovered an incredibly striking variation of a rare plant at a remote location in the mountains of Madagascar. It was definitely a candidate for its own species, with beautiful, striking, pitch black trunks, and vivid white and red stems. There only seemed to be about 6 adult specimens in the area, and it was being threatened by an encroaching commercial agriculture development.
This one guy managed to harvest and sneak out several hundred seeds. Now, most seeds in the wild aren't even viable naturally, let alone trying to figure out the exact conditions to successfully sprout them back home. Only around 100 sprouted. Of these, maybe 90% or so died over the next decade as he attempted trial and error to figure out how to make them happy. But finally, 10 years later, he had about 10 healthy adult plants.
In the meantime, rumors were that the area around where it was first discovered were bulldozed, meaning it was feared that these handful were the last of this potentially undiscovered species in the world. The plant was so pretty that if it proved viable to grow and sell commercially, being the only source of plants old enough to produce seed would have made this guy a tremendous amount of money, not to mention naming the species after himself.
The actual internationally recognized botanists who give "canon" rulings on new species, like J.Dransfield, are very busy, and generally not prone to drop everything and jet across the world to bust out their microscopes and investigate one crazy old rich guy's claim to have found a new species -- especially when the guy has an obvious vested interest in the outcome. So sometimes these claims linger for years without answer. In the meantime, without a formal ruling, if you can convince enough other collectors to agree with you and start referring to it informally as your species, then it's pretty much just as good.
So this guy loaded the 10 plants into a private, climate controlled container, hired an armed guard to accompany it to the US, and agreed to sell them to any other prestigious collector that would back up his claim, except a "black list" of others who had been meanies to him over similar incidents in the past.
Finally the big moment arrived, and they all gathered around to welcome the container as it was unloaded from the ship in port. Oddly, the guard they had hired didn't stick around for the unloading, but nobody thought much of it, until they opened the locked container and found every plant was dead. They had all been somehow doused in RoundUp somewhere during the journey, and neither the guard nor the dockworkers who were in the logs as having loaded the container in port could be found.
That's right. Though nobody really knows for sure, it seems quite possible that some butthurt old dude decided that if he didn't get to be part of the cool kids' club that got credit for discovering and propagating a new species, then he would sneak in and bribe whoever he needed in order to ensure the species was permanently wiped off the face of the planet instead.
(Edit: The story had a happy ending, as it turned out that the original guy had wisely kept a few of the original specimens for himself, but people were so spooked by the incident that the existence of any others was kept very quiet for several years. It was also determined that 6 or so other "black stem" specimens at a lodge in Madagascar were the same plant, where they would likely be safe. Still critically endangered, but at least not extinct.
In the end, it turned out not to be a new species. A few years ago it was finally ruled to be a particularly rare variation of another known plant. So nobody got to name the species, but it didn't really matter: the variation is so rare and difficult to grow, that even small potted specimens still sell for $1000+, and good luck finding anyone who'll tell you where they got it.
(Edit 2: added a pic.)