pueo's photos

The Last Place on Earth

You come down the stairs to the basement of an unassuming cottage in Manoa, you turn left and you see THIS. What is this place? Metal wire racks hung tightly with fluorescent lights, tightly packed beneath them are rows upon rows of well organized glass and plastic vessels. Each tube and glass cube holds tiny green things suspended in clear goo. On closer inspection each of these tiny green things is an individual plant. Carefully labeled and monitored. Each and every one.

This is not the secret lair of Poison Ivy, this is the Micropropagation Lab at Lyon Arboretum. This tiny lab, run by the University of Hawaii, is the last place on Earth that some of these plants exist. This is their last best hope. For many of these plants, all other propagation methods have failed to keep these plants alive in the wild and now, this lab holds the last of their kind. The tiny plants are closely monitored and tended in this climate controlled lab. Each plant is grown in a special nutrient liquid tailored to best suit their optimum growth. Depending on the plant's growth rate, the plants are periodically removed from their glass tubes, carefully cleaned of dead tissue, and replaced into new tubes with fresh nutrient solution. For these plants, this is life for months if not years. The hope is that the plants eventually will outgrow their tiny glass homes and someday be able to be planted back out in the wild. Time will only tell.

The fluorescent bulbs are these plants' daylight. If there were ever to be an extended blackout, the generator would likely not be enough to keep the air conditioning and lights on these precious rare plants going for long. For these endangered native Hawaiian plants, this may be their last sunrise.

For more information on the UH Micropropagation Lab, check out "Petrified Forest":
http://honoluluweekly.com/cover/2007/05/petrified-forest/