• Caly

Plant conservation tools

Aloha Kakou! It’s been rather warm up here in the mountains the last week and my fruits are developing nicely. Some of you may have noticed I'm wearing a new accessory! These mesh bags help protect my fruits while ripening as a deterrent from insects, birds, and rats. They won’t keep anything out but they help to obscure my developing fruit, and also allow the rare plant specialists to collect fruit if it falls off before they get here.

Managers that are working to restore the forest with rare plants like me use some other basic tools for plant conservation collections of fruits. I included some pics below:

Different types of collection bags help with transporting fruits and their seeds back to various conservation destinations like the seed lab, micropropagation lab, or the greenhouse. Plastic bags keep moisture in and are convenient for humans to carry around but can also let fruit rot. So sometimes they use paper bags or mesh to store fruit until delivery.​

A loupe is a small magnification device. Seeds or fruit of some plants are very small, and these are essential in helping see small details.​ ​

​Different size picker-poles allow them to reach fruit from taller trees!

Hōlio is a critically endangered tree on Oahu. There is only one mature individual left in the whole world. These are its seeds.

Rat traps are often deployed during fruiting season because many fruits are eaten! Deployment of rat traps led to a 10-fold increase in the number of Hōlio fruits!