Meet the First U.S. Species to Go Extinct from Sea-Level Rise
A tall cactus found only in Florida’s Key Largo is the U.S.’s first species to go extinct from sea-level rise
James Lange remembers the day he and a team of botanists and conservationists gathered at a rock formation encircled by a thicket of mangroves in Key Largo, Florida. They’d come to the nation’s last wild stand of a rare cacti to confront the inevitable. With sea level rise bringing the Atlantic Ocean ever closer to the withering plants, the group had made the difficult decision to remove the cacti’s remaining green material, preserve it in nurseries, and hope that it might one day be reintroduced in the wild.
Three years later, research published last week reveals what Lange and the others long suspected: The demise of the Key Largo tree cactus is the first recorded case of sea level rise driving a local species to extinction in the United States. Its collapse was a blow to Lange, a research botanist at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables who coauthored the study. “It was one of the things that made the Keys so special,” he said. “Just a big, bold, beautiful plant.”
Tree cactus is a suitable name for Pilosocereus millspaughii, known to reach towering heights, yield white flowers that entice nectar-hungry bats and produce reddish-purple fruits for birds and mammals to feast upon. Although the cactus still grows on a few scattered islands in the Caribbean, it was restricted to a single population in North America, a thriving stand of 150 plants discovered in the Florida Keys in 1992. By 2021, just six ailing stems remained.
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