Exploring for Plants Conserving the Cockpit Country of Jamaica

Mural on wall of Kosrae Museum showing traditional houses.

It’s exciting to get back into the field, having done this type of travel in my youth and again with the International Palm Society.  With this type of field work, one really has to be prepared for anything: rain, mud, streams and rock climbing in rain and mud through streams.  But the thrill of discovery makes one forget all the hardships.

Kosrae is nine time zones from Florida, across the International Date Line – so it’s tomorrow here already.  This small island has ruins of an ancient culture built in the thirteenth century.  It’s a slow moving island with friendly guileless people.  The Federated States of Micronesia (of which Kosrae is a state) is a US protectorate so dollars are the currency and English widely spoken, although the islanders have their own language.

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Today was our first day of hiking on Kosrae.  It was a great success– We found very healthy populations of Ponapea ledermanniana on two parts of the island, and saw many other interesting plants along the way.  Overall, we are impressed with the health of the populations we have seen. Although the distribution of Ponapea palms may be limited, they appear to be reproducing well and do not seem to be in decline here on Kosrae.  

Swampy forest of Ponapea ledermanniana palms.

This morning we searched for the last location where Ponapea palms were seen and collected more than ten years ago.  Using location data from a herbarium specimen, we followed a dirt road to its end and hiked a trail that criscrossed a stream.  Christie spotted the first Ponapea palm, and then Steve found a few further along the trail.  Eventually we found a big group of a few adult palms and many young ones.   Read More…

Today Carl, Steve, Faith and I flew into Kosrae, the smallest and most rural state of Micronesia.  We are excited to begin our hunt for Ponapea ledermanniana.  We know of only one locality but suspect it is spread throughout the island.

Leaving the airport, the first thing I noticed was the limited amount of flat land that is squeezed between the rugged mountains and mighty ocean.  It is on this narrow swath of land ringing the island that the residents live. 

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Fairchild Trustee Faith Bishock and I made the trek to Honolulu, Hawaii, on Wednesday to begin the first leg of our expedition.  We are taking advantage of the altogether unavoidable plane stop here on the 8,000 mile journey to the Federated States of Micronesia.

Think of our time in Honolulu as a warm-up exercise before the big workout.  We practiced our palm spotting and plant collecting skills at Lyon Arboretum on Thursday.  It just so happens that Lyon has specimens of all three Ponapea species we’ll be studying on this expedition.  Faith was the first to spot Ponapea palauensis.  Ray Baker, research associate at Lyon, graciously spent the entire day with us, mucking around in the rain.  We collected lots of seeds, cuttings and root divisions of cool tropical plants not already in the Fairchild collections.  They are on their way back to Fairchild as I write.
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We recently made a surprising discovery in the Fairchild / FIU DNA lab. We were studying the DNA of palms from throughout the world, and we happened to include three species from the islands of Micronesia. As we analyzed data from those species, we realized they were not what we expected. The three species were called Ptychosperma hosinoi, Ptychosperma ledermannianum, and Ptychosperma palauensis, but we found that they were distinct from the other species of Ptychosperma.  They clearly belonged in a separate genus.
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