The Washington Post - USA (2022-04-25)

A8 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, APRIL 25 , 2022

BY JULIAN MARK

For decades, the Centinela
rainforest in Ecuador was the
subject of tropical botanists’
dreams. The problem was it didn’t
exist anymore.
The slice of forest was said to be
among the most biodiverse eight
square miles recorded in the
world, containing 90 species of
plants that couldn’t b e found any-
where else. But, according to the
scientists who had intensely stud-
ied the rainforest and presented
their findings three decades ago,
Centinela and all its biological
treasures had been cleared and
replaced with plantations, along
with more than 90 percent of
western Ecuador’s rainforests.
The tragedy even got its own
name. A “centinelan extinction”
came to describe the sudden anni-
hilation of a species before it
could be known or understood.
One plant, spotted in the Centi-
nela rainforest before it had re-
portedly been wiped out, encap-
sulated the concept — a bulbous
neon-orange flower whose name
preordained it as lost forever: the
Gasteranthus extinctus.
Now, a group of botanists who
have since set foot in the Centi-
nela rainforest says sizable pock-
ets still exist, despite the claims of
their predecessors — and they
have found the flower presumed
to be extinct for decades, shining
like neon-orange spotlights
through the rainforest’s foliage.
“We walked closer and closer,
and we just knew that was it
because of the color of the flow-
ers,” Dawson White, a botanist
with Chicago’s Field Museum who
ventured into the Centinela rain-
forest in search of the flower, told
The Washington Post.
In the end, the G. extinctus
wasn’t very hard to find. After the
group realized enough of the for-
est existed to support diverse
plant life, it searched several
pockets and found the flower
within h ours, according to a study
published Friday in the journal
PhytoKeys.
“We found it just about every-
where,” Nigel Pitman, a botanist
with the Field Museum and a lead
author of the study, told The Post.
While the study focuses on the
rediscovery of G. extinctus — a
finding that grabbed headlines —
Pitman said it was more remark-

able that his team had found ex-

isting pockets of rainforest at the

Centinela ridge and can challenge

the widely held belief that the

rainforest had been almost en-

tirely destroyed.

“Everything that made me and

my colleagues passionate about

saving tropical forests was this

story of a place that was celebrat-

ed and mourned at the same

time,” Pitman said of the Centi-

nela rainforest, “because it had so

much amazing stuff in it — and

then it was suddenly gone.”

But “it isn’t all gone,” he added.

“We did find patches of forest, and

there is still an opportunity to

preserve it.”

In 1991, botanists Alwyn Gen-

try and Calaway Dodson, then

leaders in their field, published a

paper titled “Biological Extinc-

tion in Western Ecuador.” I t found

that the vast majority of rainfor-

ests in western Ecuador, a partic-

ularly biodiverse area the size of

North Carolina, had been cleared

to make way for banana, coffee

and cacao plantations — a situa-

tion that Pitman and White said

has only worsened since that pa-

per was published.

But a portion of the paper fo-

cused on a particular foothill of

the Andes — the Centinela ridge, a

cloud forest that contained 90

plant species that existed there

and nowhere else, an unusually

high number of endemic plants,

White explained to The Post.

“Many of these species at C enti-

nela are strikingly beautiful and

quite unlike any known” plant

groups, the authors of the 1991

study wrote.

Ye t in the same beat, they deliv-

ered a gut punch: “The main ridge

is now deforested, and an unde-

termined number of these species

are now extinct.”

Pitman, who was in college

when the paper was published,

said the story that Gentry and

Dodson told was “foundational”

for biologists in his field.

“We talked about it all the

time,” Pitman said. “It was so

inspiring and so compelling to us

that we just sort of took it as

gospel.”

In h is 1992 book “The Diversity

of Life,” biologist Edward O. Wil-

son took the Centinela story a step

further, using it as a symbol of the

“silent hemorrhaging of biologi-

cal diversity” and coining the

term “centinelan extinction,”

which came to describe the de-

struction of species before they

could be discovered or fully stud-

ied.

It was from those narratives of

Centinela that the Gasteranthus

extinctus — a bright orange flow-

er that had once been observed on

the ridge — received its name,

according to the study published

Friday. Pitman told The Post he

did not know of any other plant

whose name contained the word

“extinct.”

Ye t around the time the G. ex-

tinctus received its name — nearly

a decade after Dodson and Gen-

try’s paper published — the Centi-

nela narrative began to show

cracks. Plant species the authors

had said existed only in Centinela

were discovered elsewhere. Bota-

nists who visited Centinela re-

ported that small patches of forest

remained in the area, although no

one had sought to fully study

them, according to Pitman.

So several years ago, Pitman

and White set out to test what had

previously been reported about

Centinela. What they found were

pockets of diverse wilderness

large enough to get lost in — with

some containing howler monkeys

and cascading waterfalls, White

and Pitman told The Post.

“The fact that it still has these

large monkeys is an amazing sign

of the health of this forest,” White

said. “Some other places that

we’ve visited, gosh, they could be

national parks.”

And shining through the for-

est’s low-lying foliage and along

rock walls — and even in cattle

pastures bordering the forest

fragments — was the flower that

was supposed to be extinct. Pit-

man said he had been using a line

drawing to identify the flower. So

“when I got close enough to see it,

the sensation was that the line

drawing had come to life.”

White said the feeling of seeing

the flower, which in many ways

had come to symbolize the story

of Centinela, was “just elation and

really a sense of purpose.”

The scientists are now using

the discovery of the large forest

fragments and the Gasteranthus

extinctus to push for conserva-

tion, as they said deforestation of

western Ecuador continues. And

while at times White can’t avoid

defaulting to a sense of hopeless-

ness looking over the largely de-

forested western Ecuadoran

landscape, he said, their most

recent discovery calls for opti-

mism.

“Because every win is a win,” he

said. “A nd right here we are saving

something that is demonstrably

unique.”

A flower was named for its own extinction — and then it was rediscovered

RILEY FORTIER

Gasteranthus extinctus was found growing in a private reserve in the Centinela region in Ecuador. One botanist noted that it was more

remarkable to discover pockets of Centinela rainforest, given the widely held belief that it had been almost entirely destroyed.

“We walked closer and closer, and we just knew

that was it because of the color of the flowers.”

Dawson White, a botanist with Chicago’s Field Museum, on how the rainforest

seemed to have orange spotlights shining through the foliage

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