Book Reviewed: The Plant Messiah by Carlos Magdalena

Studying the Silent Extinction of Rare Plants

In ecology, extinction refers to termination of an organism or of a group of organisms. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, and the ability to breed and recover may have been lost before this point. This term is generally used with animal extinction, but there are very few ecologists who study plant extinction. In this book, environmental biologist Carlos Magdalena describes his studies across to understand how plant extinction are taking place, and how we can fix this silent extinction.

The factors contributing to their disappearance are varied and complex, but the consequences of their loss are immeasurable. The author explores the principle factors for extinction. In almost all cases changes brought about in the environment by humans; through deforestation, breaking the natural balance with the introduction non-native species of animals, and global warming.

Some of the interesting examples from this book includes; The jellyfish tree, is a critically endangered and endemic to the island of Seychelles. It has been suggested that these trees have been lost from the natural habitat of moist forests through competition with other species and climate change. Roussea simplex is native of Mauritius in Indian Ocean, where it grows in mountain forests. The flowers of Roussea produce copious amounts of nectar and are pollinated only by the blue-tailed day gecko. The fruit secretes a gelatinous substance that contains the minute seeds. The blue-tailed gecko licks up this secretion and disperses the seeds in its droppings. But a small ant introduced to Mauritius by colonists invades the flowers of Roussea and cover with clay to protect themselves. The ants sting blue-tailed day gecko from drinking the pollen and thus stopping pollination process. Trochetia boutoniana also known by its native Creole name Boucle d'Oreille is a shrub close to extinction, because the monkeys introduced into its natural habitat feed on plants blossom buds that effectively eliminated this plant species.

The book is not accompanied by illustrations or the photographs of plants becoming extinct in natural habitats. On the lesser side of science, I find the title of this book is somewhat outlandish, after all no one used this term for other renowned ecologists and environmental biologists.