An extinct flower native to a small region in South Africa has been rediscovered by scientists, more than 40 years since the last official sighting.
The mini galaxy (Moraea minima) is a small plant with pale yellow iris-like flowers that blooms for only a few hours after it has rained. It is unique to a tiny area of the Western Cape near the southernmost tip of Africa.
The plant hadn’t been recorded by scientists in the wild since 1981, until, in August 2022, Eugéne Hahndiek at South Africa’s Nuwejaars Special Management Area (SMA) within the SMA’s conservation boundaries.
Advertisement
He posted a picture of it on the iNaturalist website, initially identifying it as the closely related and prolific midday clock flower (Moraea galaxia).
It was only three months ago that experts from the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) saw the post and recognised the flower as M. minima.
The SANBI team then searched the area, locating five or six of the plants in August 2023, around 10 kilometres from where Hahndiek found his specimen.
“It’s so difficult to find this plant flowering, simply because you’ve got to wait for it to rain and then you’ve got to wait for the temperature to warm up enough to start flowering, and then you’ve got a limited time span of a few hours to go and look in new areas for this plant,” says Hahndiek.
The mini galaxy was last collected in 1981, from a site that is now overgrazed by livestock and infested with non-native plant species. Subsequent surveys to find the plant failed, leading SANBI to declare it “possibly extinct”.
Nuwejaars’s SMA covers an area of 47,000 hectares that comprises 26 farms whose owners have signed title deed restrictions, which means that half of the area is protected for rare plants and other wildlife.
“There are all sorts of secrets out there; things that we don’t expect,” says Hahndiek. “It’s worth protecting the natural areas for things like this.”
