When Hurricane Fabian bore down on Bermuda in 2003, 120-mile per-hour winds ripped across the islands, taking the lives of four people and causing $300 million in damage. The Bermuda Botanical Garden greenhouse stood in the storm’s path. Up until just a few days before the hurricane, the building had housed the last five remaining specimens of the Governor Laffan’s fern. These ferns are native to Bermuda, and due to habitat destruction and invasive species, they hadn’t been seen in the wild since 1905. They grow nowhere else in the world, and no other garden had them in their collection.
The plants were difficult to reproduce in the greenhouse, and the botanical garden had been having little success. Through a network of plant experts and enthusiasts in the United States, Bermuda’s environmental agencies were aware of the Department for Plant Conservation at Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium, and they reached out to Marge From, the lab’s Director of Plant Research. Together they decided that two tiny fertile fronds should travel to Nebraska for propagation in the lab. The 1.5-inch samples shipped out of Bermuda just days before the hurricane struck.
Hurricane Fabian destroyed the greenhouse and damaged the remaining ferns in Bermuda, leaving the survival of the species entirely dependent on the spore-bearing fronds that had arrived safely at From’s lab. Over time, using the lab’s carefully developed protocols, she coaxed the spores to germinate.
The botanical garden knew to contact From because of the lab’s worldwide reputation. The lab’s success is a result of the hard work and dedication of From and her colleagues, but the vision for a plant lab dedicated entirely to conservation had been sparked years earlier at a CPSG workshop for a completely different endangered plant.
In 1997, CPSG led a workshop for the western prairie fringed orchid, an endangered flower native to the North American tallgrass prairie. The product of the meeting was a plan for conserving orchids, but an equally important result was the impact of the ideas it generated. Although the group had focused on the orchid, Dr. Lee Simmons, then-Director of Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo, left the meeting with a new perspective on plant and habitat conservation as the basis of all conservation efforts. Soon after, he made the zoo’s involvement in endangered plant research a top priority and began to develop a laboratory devoted entirely to plant conservation. CPSG had created space for innovative thinking related to plant conservation in general.
“There are only a handful of plant research labs in the United States that are dedicated to conservation,” said From. “Thanks to the workshop, the Omaha Zoo jumped into plant and habitat conservation in a big way. As a result, our plant research lab has been asked to help with conservation of threatened plants in the United States, Canada, Madagascar, Central America, and Bermuda.”
Without the lab’s reputation, the Bermuda Botanical Garden would likely not have connected with From, and the few remaining Governor Laffan’s ferns would have been destroyed by the hurricane. Instead, not only does the species flourish in the Omaha Zoo’s lab, but From’s team has flown thousands of plants back to Bermuda.
As of 2019, 16 reintroduced sub-populations of Governor Laffan’s ferns thrive in two protected areas, in spite of both devastating drought and hurricanes that year, and hundreds of young plants are getting ready for reintroduction in 2020.
What about the fate of the western prairie fringed orchid, for which the catalytic workshop was convened in the first place? Orchids from the lab are no longer being introduced into the wild, but the orchids continue to appear in the wild.
In the lab, efforts continue to preserve orchid seeds for long-term conservation efforts. Results are promising, with the seeds growing better than expected after being frozen and stored. Conservation progress for the two species can be traced back to a common factor, according to From: “Many of the protocols developed for the orchid as a result of recommendations from the workshop were eventually used in conservation of the Governor Laffan’s fern. All of this has come about, in large part, because of the CPSG workshop.”
