One Trivia Quiz

Answer: apple

Bardsey Island has long been associated with religious activities. An abbey was built there around the year 516 and the island is the burial place of many saints. The monks tended to an apple orchard, but it and the abbey were abandoned in the 13th Century.

A small population remained on the island but it took until 1998 for somebody to realize that a lone tree near the remains of the abbey was was producing an apple that was unlike any other known to exist. Cuttings from that one tree have since been propagated and the Bardsey Island apple is in no particular danger of dying out any time soon.

Answer: Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew

Campions are a widely-distributed flower in the northern hemisphere, but the Gibraltar campion was only found in Gibraltar. It dwindled away and was presumed extinct, but in 1994 a hiker found one along the cliffs of Upper Rock Nature Reserve. The last remaining individual of this plant with small white flowers has since been propagated, and its seeds have been added to the Millennium Seed Bank coordinated by the Royal Gardens at Kew. Kew also keeps the type specimen of this unique flower, and it is one of many very rare plants that they have helped propagate.

Answer: timber

Like many remote locations, St Helena featured a long list of unique wildlife. The St Helena redwood was a large, beautiful tree that was in particular found good for use as timber and in tanning. Contemporary accounts suggest that overexploitation was common.

By the 18th Century, only a few dozen remained, and most of those could be found in gardens that settlers had planted. Despite this, they declined further and by the 20th Century, one was left. Intervention resulted in the collection of seeds, and a number of these redwoods now exist.

Unfortunately, it seems that the genetic bottleneck weakened them, and those that remain may never be as strong as their impressive ancestors.

Answer: male

In 1895, a cluster of four stems belonging to a single cycad was discovered on a cliff in Ngoya Forest, South Africa. In 1908, it was classified as a new species. The four stems were eventually taken and sent to different parts of the globe. Two of them died, but the other two survived, and many propagations have been made from the original four stems.

The catch in propagating the only member of this species is that it is male, and no female individuals have ever been seen. However, offsets -- shoots from the original plants -- have been highly successful at creating numerous clones of the original. Fertile hybrids with similar species have also been made.

Answer: goats

Three Kings Islands are a set of islands off the northwest peninsula of New Zealand. In 1945, a professor roaming the island to help rid it of pestilent goats discovered a unique tree which has since been named the Three Kings kaikomako. Cuttings were taken from the tree and eventually allowed for a viable population to be grown. One of the things that has hampered the propagation of this lone tree was that it is suspected to be female (and thus needed a male), but self-fertilizing cuttings taken from it have made this questionable.

It has since become widespread in cultivation.

Answer: coppice

A coppice is what happens when a tree is cut down to the ground to stimulate growth. This can be done naturally or intentionally, and in the case of the Wollemi pine happens naturally. A few small stands of these pines were discovered by a ranger in part of New South Wales, Australia in 1994. On further study, they were found to be unknown to science, with the closest-related plants being two million-year-old fossils.

The handful of surviving trees are all genetically identical, suggesting that at one point the population had dropped down to only one.

While their exact location has been undisclosed to the public, water mold found at their location suggests that the place has been compromised.

Answer: Mauritius

Mauritius has been home to far more than the dodo. One of the unique plants native to the island is the cafe marron, a type of coffee plant. In 1979, a teacher was explaining to a class that it had not been sighted since 1877, when a kid in the class said there was one near his house.

A bit of it was analyzed and sure enough, it turned out to be the very last one of its kind. The government put a fence around it to protect it from goats -- and that attracted the attention of locals who figured it must have special powers to be getting that sort of protection.

It took four fences and a guard to finally secure the poor plant. Decades of dedicated effort finally bore fruit in 2003, and viable seeds have helped keep the café marron from becoming extinct.

Answer: mud

It's not petty trivia: this particular water lily is the only known water lily that prefers to grow in mud rather than water. This particular plant is the world's smallest water lily and is so obscure that it doesn't have a common name, though some people informally call it the pygmy Rwandan water lily.

It was discovered in 1987 at a hot spring in Rwanda, and went extinct in the wild when the spring dried up. Specimens had been sent to botanic gardens to preserve it, but had dwindled to one plant and a few dozen seeds by the time people had figured out how to grow the seeds.

They had to reproduce the exact environmental conditions the water lily grew in, and if that sounds obvious, keep in mind it only ever grew in a remote, specific location the size of your bedroom.

Answer: grafting

Cooke's koki'o is a great example of a species with a terrible streak of luck. When scientists discovered it in the 1860s, they only found three of them. These had died by the 1950s, and it was thought extinct until one was discovered in 1970 where some had previously grown. That individual was destroyed by lightning a few years later.

The only way this tree survives is through graftings taken of that plant before it was destroyed, and thus not even one whole individual still exists. Cooke's koki'o is believed to be a victim of co-extinction, and might have been pollinated by one of Hawaii's extinct birds.

It is unclear if the difficulty its seeds have in surviving is due to inbreeding or if the conditions of its growth are just not known.

Answer: Herod

This last one is of biblical proportions. The Judean date palm was the palm mentioned in the Bible and one the Jews relied on for a number of things. The conditions of its extinction are disputed, but contemporary accounts suggest it may have persisted into the 14th Century.

In 1965, excavations at Herod's palace (yes, THAT Herod) at Masada unearthed a jar of well-preserved seeds. Forty years later, some people got the bright idea to try and grow them, and in 2005, one of them grew. This individual was of course named Methuselah. Being a lone male, propagation of the Judean date palm has been difficult, but it has been found to crossbreed with similar palms of the region.

In 2015, Methuselah's pollen was crossbred for the first time and used to make a batch of dates.