November 15: The Life and Death of the Franciscan Manzanita

This week, we celebrate the wins amid the losses with news about the extinction of North America’s rarest plants. While the Franciscan manzanita, Arctostaphylos franciscana, (take a look below) is now officially pronounced extinct, it has had a fascinating history--and technically, we haven’t lost it forever yet. It was first named by one of the first female pioneers in botany, Alice Eastwood. During the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, as fire reached the California Academy of Sciences, Eastwood and her colleagues salvaged thousands of plants, including the rare Franciscan manzanita. Yet, the last recorded sighting in the wild was in 1947 (see here). Fast forward more than 60 years, conservationists found the plant growing along a highway leading to the Golden Gate Bridge early last month. In 2010, they planned a delicate extraction of the shrub. In the care of botanists, the mother shoot is doing well. However, the downside of this scientific coddling is that the Franciscan manzanita is no longer considered to be a species living on its own - which is why it was recently designated as extinct. Yet, we can still find hope in the extensive efforts that were taken by Eastwood and many others to save even the rarest beauties of nature.

Natalie Wang is currently working on her undergraduate degree in neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University as a Hodson Trust Scholar. Her research interests are in DNA damage and repair, as well as post-operative delirium in elderly patients. Natalie started volunteering with WIS PDX in 2019 as a member of the outreach and education team. When not listening to music or doom-scrolling on Twitter, she can be found checking closets for Narnia.