Researchers work to propagate Australia's rarest tree
There are just six remaining examples of the mongarlowe mallee left in the wild, in several patches of private bushland in southern NSW. Scientists now have a rare window to breed the trees, in the hope of saving the species from extinction.
Transcript
00:00 We're on the hunt in southern NSW for what could be Australia's rarest and loneliest
00:07 tree. But locating it is like finding a needle in a haystack.
00:13 We're in an area called Mongalo. What we're standing in here is called Alacazarina nana
00:20 heath. And there's a lot of species in here that sort of grow in here and not in other
00:24 places.
00:25 This is what we came for, the Mongalo mallee, known to science as Eucalyptus recurva. It
00:32 may not look it, but this tree is thousands of years old. Each time it's knocked back
00:38 by fire, it re-sprouts again.
00:41 We don't have a lot of species around that have their origins 6,000 years ago. And I
00:48 think they hold really important information and keys to the ecology of Australia.
00:55 Since the last ice age, the Mongalo mallee has been sliding towards a natural extinction.
01:01 There are now just six of them left.
01:03 Now the remaining individuals are all separated by at least two kilometres and are no longer
01:09 getting cross-pollinated, so they're no longer producing seed. It is an incredible story
01:14 of loneliness, yes, indeed.
01:18 Because there are so few of these special trees left in the wild, their precise location
01:23 will always be kept secret. But what makes them all the more vulnerable is that each
01:29 tree grows on private land outside the protection of a national park.
01:35 Last year ecologists had a once in a generation chance to cross-pollinate two of the trees
01:40 and soon they'll try and germinate the seeds, something that hasn't happened naturally for
01:46 thousands of years. Their end goal, to save the Mongalo mallee in Australian gardens.
01:53 Many people would love to have this plant in their garden, being such a rare species.
01:58 I think many people would value this just because it is such a rare species and it's
02:02 such an unusual eucalypt. So it would be a tragedy to lose it.
02:08 One last desperate roll of the dice for a species that was headed for an evolutionary
02:14 dead end.
02:14 [BLANK_AUDIO]