New Plant Species Discovered in Big Bend National Park

New Plant Species Discovered in Big Bend National Park | line4k – The Ultimate IPTV Experience – Watch Anytime, Anywhere

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In March 2024, Deb Manley, a volunteer in Big Bend National Park, Texas, uploaded photos of a small, low-lying plant covered in silvery fuzz to the species identification app iNaturalist. The app populates a public map with observations of plants and animals, which shows how frequently species are observed in a given area and can bring the user community together to tackle tricky identifications. Manley sparked one of those puzzles when she shared her photos of the plant, which she and other park staff had encountered on a hike. Curiosity soon gave way to excitement when users realized that the plant did not match any species known to science. Not only was this the first recorded sighting on iNaturalist, it was the first recorded sighting, period.

“It’s very rare for something so different from what we know to be found,” says Isaac Lichter Marck, a plant evolutionary biologist at the California Academy of Sciences who worked on genetic analysis of the new species. Now, one year after the initial sighting, the Big Bend species has been formally described in an article published in the journal PhytoKeys, and given the scientific name Ovicula biradiata. Informally, it’s become known as “the woolly devil,” for its fur and the “devil horn”-like rays protruding from its flowers. The discovery marks both a new species, and the first new genus found in a national park since a yellow-flowered shrub called July gold was discovered in Death Valley back in 1976.

Although the woolly devil is abundant in a few small areas of the park, more research is needed to understand how to protect it. Clockwise from top left: Dana Sloan, Cathy Hoyt, Kelsey Wogan, James Bailey / Public Domain

Lichter Marck explains that in order to document the woolly devil, botanists first had to apply for a permit from the park to collect samples. “They reached out to me as somebody who could help with sequencing the DNA and describing the plant in detail,” says Lichter Marck, because of his expertise with North American desert daisies. The woolly devil has telltale anatomical features of Asteraceae, the daisy and sunflower family, one of the largest and most diverse families of flowering plants. “Overall, the goal was to figure out what were the relationships between this interesting plant and other known species of wild sunflowers,” says Lichter Marck. “And based on that, how should this new plant be classified? Basically trying to solve the woolly mystery.”

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