Sydney region’s first new plant find in decades

The discovery of Sydney’s newest plant was not a quick or simple exercise.

Andrew Robinson, a bushland officer with the Ku-ring-gai Council, was on his first visit to a nature reserve back in 2006 when his eyes fixed on a “straggly little thing” less than a metre from the track.

Kneeling down, Mr Robinson examined the plant up close. Clearly a native hibbertia, it was one the then-24-year-old couldn’t identify from the thousand or so plant species he’d memorised.

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Nice, must be a great feeling.

Hibbertia’s a big genus.

New plant species are being discovered everyday in Australia, but few so close to a large human population. Normally various naturalist groups would come across such plants on their field walks, but if they had, the information was not passed onto the right person(s). Quite possibly it was misidentified by others and disregarded as unimportant, but more likely, as Hibbertia’s have relatively only recently been revised, plants in that genus were largely overlooked and not collected by naturalists due to their inability to ID them.

It’s been said that the total number of new flowering plant species in Europe will now remain fairly constant, because although hundreds of new species are being discovered each year, hundreds are also eliminated each year as they are found to be synonyms.

PS, Organisers of the Melbourne City Centre bioblitz, now on, have hopes that it will turn up some new species. My smallest insect found so far is 0.75 mm long and 0.2 mm across – the new USB microscope only shows that it’s probably some sort of thrips, will take it along to the museum later for a proper photograph.

mollwollfumble said:

It’s been said that the total number of new flowering plant species in Europe will now remain fairly constant, because although hundreds of new species are being discovered each year, hundreds are also eliminated each year as they are found to be synonyms.

PS

That’s interesting. Can the same be said for animals?