ABOVE: A critically endangered Cyanea grimesiana, one of the rarest plants in the world. The endemic lobelia has been extinct in the wild since 2004; the Plant Extinction Prevention Program (PEPP) is working to bring it and other Hawaii lobeliads back from the brink.
There's no free ride to Kaala," Susan Ching likes to tell the passengers in her back seat, whether it's her conservation colleagues, a reporter or her own two children. What she means is that everyone has to help out. She drives to the top of Oahu's highest peak every six weeks to monitor a different group of keiki (children-in this case, young plants). Volunteers have outplanted 2,500 Lobelia oahuensis seedlings, to date the largest statewide effort to replenish the population of a rare plant. This record-breaking undertaking is the critically endangered species' best hope for survival. Fewer than twenty plants had been thought to exist in the wild before the project to restore Kaala's slopes began.
There are so many dizzying turns on the one-lane road to the top of the mountain that it's impossible not to stare out the window and watch the surrounding foliage transition from eucalyptus, grass and other introduced plants to a greener landscape of gnarled, moss-covered ohia lehua trees and impressive ferns. Above four thousand feet, we enter an Oahu that existed before us. But even in the absence of non-native and invasive plants, other human-introduced invasives threaten the lobelia keiki. Left unchecked, slugs and vermin would make quick work of the plants' long, leafless stems.
Ching, the Oahu botanist for the Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR), and Kobey Togikawa, the Oahu technician for the Plant Extinction Prevention Program (PEPP), have come up the mountain to replace the temporary defenses against these critters. They're checking the air canisters of rat traps and scattering iron phosphate pellets, which kill slugs without harming other wildlife. According to Togikawa's calculations, most of the keiki on this part of the mountain have survived since they were outplanted from a greenhouse a year ago. By contrast, fewer than a tenth of the lobelias planted in less accessible areas have persisted.
Even here, though, not all the keiki have thrived. Crouching to peer at a shriveled, ankle-high lobelia, its once-defiant crown of green leaves gone, Ching points out a handful of seed pods adorning the upper part of the stem. This species, she explains, flowers once and dies. Normally, the plants would grow for decades, building up enough energy to eventually funnel into a spectacular display of hundreds of periwinkle-colored flowers, which give way to pods containing millions of tiny seeds. This lobelia bloomed prematurely, possibly because of the stress of its transition from a controlled greenhouse to the harsh realities of the wild. Of course, plants die for all sorts of reasons. Predation and the inconsistencies of a changing climate play a role, though the way these effects are distributed can be random. Still, with plants as rare as these, chance is often the difference between survival and extinction.
Botanist Susan Ching hikes to check on lobelias transplanted to native forest areas on Oahu's Mount Kaala.
Ching gently admonishes the desiccated plant: "What are you doing? You're too little," she says. "You're not going to contribute to the population-you're going to maybe have three seeds in there." Then she imagines the plant's response: "But they're like, 'We couldn't hold it in!'"
Hawaii's lobeliads (a group that includes Lobelia and its five sister genera) tell a remarkable tale of adaptation. Within their diversity is a wealth of stories—geological ones, about the formation of the Hawaiian archipelago; evolutionary ones, about the animals they evolved defenses against and the ones they attracted to reproduce; and cultural ones, about the practices of Native Hawaiians. These stories are at risk of disappearing because of immediate threats—more species of Hawaii lobeliads are threatened or endangered than any other plant or animal lineage. As these rare, striking plants decline, botanists are working against the clock toward both a concrete and an intangible goal: to increase the populations of these plants in the wild and simultaneously preserve the stories woven into their roots, stems, leaves, flowers and fruit.
As with any rare plant, saving the lobeliads means saving humans from our own worst tendencies—of exploiting land and, alternately, of suffocating what we have by holding it too tightly. "Overloving," as Ching calls it-seeking them out, visiting to take pictures, etc.—can be just as dangerous as not loving enough.
It's said that all of Hawaii's native plants came to the Islands via one of three routes: wind, wave or wing. The lobeliads are no exception. Approximately thirteen million years ago, eons before the formation of any of the main islands we know today as Hawaii, wind-borne seeds from just one species of ancestral lobeliad likely landed on a now-underwater island near Gardner Pinnacles. Once a high island itself, this islet existed more than 550 miles northwest of where Kauai is today, but millions of years before any of the eight main islands of modern-day Hawaii emerged. Once established, the plants evolved, changed and adapted. Today, scientists recognize at least 142 distinct species of Hawaii lobeliad, and a handful of new species are discovered or reclassified each year.
The lobeliads are the most successful example of "adaptive radiation" known in the world. It's a phenomenon in which a single species evolves into many different ones after it colonizes new geographic and ecological areas. Islands, with their remoteness, variety and abundance, are hot spots for this kind of sped-up adaptation—the Galapagos, with about a dozen unique species of both tortoises and finches, is the textbook example of adaptive radiation, literally: Charles Darwin formulated his theory of natural selection partly by observing Galapagos finches, and there were a mere thirteen species when the HMS Beagle visited in 1835. But that's nothing compared with Hawaii lobeliads, a flashy exception to the classical theory of evolution as a slow, incremental force. Indeed, the plants had such an impact on Hawaii's biodiversity that they catalyzed a secondary radiation among the insects and birds that pollinated them.
Kobey Togikawa, PEPP's sole Oahu technician, propagates Hawaii lobelias in a Pearl City greenhouse.
Three hundred thousand years after its arrival to the Islands—a blink of an eye in evolutionary time—that ancestor lobeliad spread throughout the existing islets and atolls, and two groups emerged. One grew solely in moist, high-elevation forests, while the other inhabited swamps, grasslands and eventually cliffs and alpine bogs. Just three million years after their introduction, the lobeliads had split into the six genera, ones that still exist: Lobelia, Cyanea, Clermontia, Trematolobelia, Delissea and Brighamia. It's not too difficult to spot some of these plants if you know what you're looking for: long, bare stems that lead to a shock of leaves, giving lobeliads a distinctly prehistoric or Dr. Seussian appearance.
Within each genus, shared traits can be even odder. Many species of Cyanea have spikes adorning their bases and snaking partway up their stems—likely a defensive structure, but a perplexing one, as the plants would have had few natural predators. Scientists hypothesize that the spikes protected Cyanea from the moa nalo (lost fowl), an extinct, toddler-size, flightless bird; the spikes rise only as high as the approximate height of the birds. Brighamia, on the other hand, baffled early botanists so much that the namesake of one of the genus' two species, Joseph Rock, wrote that "it certainly is a most grotesque plant" and agreed with an earlier scientist's assessment that it looked like a cabbage impaled on a fence post.
When Kauai emerged approximately five million years ago, lobeliads were transported by wind, wave and wing to the new habitats, continuing to evolve based on the island's unique pressures and resources. It's barely hyperbolic to say that anywhere a new environmental region arose, so did endemic lobeliads. While the ancestor lobeliad grew dry pods that relied on the wind to scatter seeds, lobeliad descendants began to depend on birds and occasionally moths for dispersal. Around the time of Kauai's emergence, Hawaiian honeycreepers diverged from ancestral birds into their own lineage, developing their distinctive curved beaks that fit perfectly into the tubular flowers of lobeliads. Anything that impacts one affects the other, and the misfortunes of the lobeliads and honeycreepers today are inseparable.
When the Polynesians first arrived, they too must have been taken in by these strange and wonderful plants. Some may have felt familiar, as endemic lobeliads are found across the southern Pacific islands. There are multiple Hawaiian terms for lobeliads: Haha, the Hawaiian word for Cyanea, makes up part of the phrase "haha ai a ka manu"—haha, eaten by the birds. That's the refrain of a song taught to famed Hawaiian musician Eddie Kamae by kupuna (elder) William Kuwalu. Kuwalu recalled that when he was young, his father and uncle took him hunting in the cloud forest of Kauai. "We went to this tree where the birds—only Hawaiian birds, like the oo and the iiwi—were eating this sweet fruit," Kuwalu said in a documentary film. Asked about the tree's identity, his uncle responded in song:
Sweet haha ai a ka manu
O ka nani Waialeale i ka iu
Hanohano e hoohie a e nei
E kii no wau e kui a lei
(Sweet haha eaten by the birds
Of beautiful Waialeale so lofty
In whose glory we delight
I'll gather and string a lei)
Another lobeliad, Lobelia hypoleuca, has at least four Hawaiian names. One, opelu, directly compares the leaf's silvery undersides to the mackerel scad, a fish known by the same Hawaiian name. Moowahie is less glamorous: It means "fragments of burnable wood," or kindling.
It's not much of a stretch to extrapolate that the meanings of these terms, and the existence of Hawaiian terms at all, are a metric of historical abundance. Even today, lobelias in untrammeled areas like Olokui peak on Molokai make up over a fifth of the forest canopy, says Sam Ohu Gon III, the senior scientist and cultural adviser for The Nature Conservancy of Hawaii and Palmyra. "There the abundance of lobelioids is amazing," he says.
Otherwise, it's rare to see lobeliad groves, due to introduced pests and weeds. Though some species can produce millions of seeds per plant, ungulates like pigs and goats plow up the understory, while mice, rats and slugs nibble away at young plants. Elsewhere, invasive plants like Brazilian peppertree and Himalayan ginger outcompete native growth and increase the odds of landslides. Climate change threatens lobeliads, subtly at first. Cool cloud forests are not so rainy anymore—on the day we drove up Kaala, there were no clouds to block the sun from drying up the muddy earth.
On Kaala direct human impacts are palpable, too. As a pair of hikers passed by one of the L. oahuensis outplantings, Ching quizzed them on where they were from (Poland) and how they'd heard about the hike (Instagram). Togikawa hung back, bashful, but Ching was vindicated. She'd downloaded heat maps from Strava, a popular tracking app for running and hiking, as proof that people are hiking up the mountain and straying off the trail to see rare plants they've viewed on social media. Not all abide by the hiking mantra, "Leave no trace." "We have found people who've gone to the bathroom right in our outplanting," Ching says. "So gross."
Publicizing conservation efforts can have these sorts of unintended consequences. When DLNR put out a press release about the 2,500 outplantings, eagle-eyed viewers identified one of the sites from a picture and flocked to the plants. Tragically, overloving killed some of them.
"When we returned, they had stepped on all the seedlings," Ching says. "It's heartbreaking."
When Honolulu Beerworks in Kakaako unveiled a partnership with the Hawaii Snail Extinction Prevention Program, the beer sold out in one day and attracted the highest number of visitors to the brewery since the start of the pandemic. With its lobelia-themed beer, produced in partnership with PEPP and Oahu's Lyon Arboretum, the brewery nearly doubled production to ensure there would be plenty of Haha-loha to go around.
Conservationists are working to educate the public without contributing to overloving. On a recent morning, Ching, Togikawa and botanists from PEPP and Oahu's Lyon Arboretum gathered at a local brewery. Based on the success of a collaboration with conservationists of endemic kahuli tree snails, Honolulu Beerworks in Kakaako offered to create a themed beer for lobeliads. Staff marveled at model cans displaying the design of the Haha-loha beer (a portmanteau of haha and aloha), featuring illustrations of endemic Cyanea from each of the main islands. There were flowers ranging from creme to deep purple belonging to Cyanea rivularis from Kauai, Cyanea konahuanuiensis from Oahu, Cyanea procera from Molokai, Cyanea horrida from Maui and Cyanea shipmanii from Hawaii Island. It didn't escape notice that some of the flowering lobeliads looked like a cross between an orchid and the Demogorgon from Stranger Things.
In the spirit of a botanist who claimed the nectar of some lobeliads, including L. oahuensis, tasted like grape soda, brewers planned to create a sour beer with lemongrass, calamansi and Concord grape jelly. Honolulu Beerworks put PEPP and Lyon staff to work slicing citrus and crushing lemongrass, which they added to the grain and hops circulating in one of the brewery's large vats. Each of the scientists took turns pouring in ingredients and stirring with a long wooden paddle. The mixture flowed into an even larger metal tankard to ferment, and in less than a week, the beer filled seven kegs and one hundred cases of cans, each illustrated with a composite image of four endemic lobeliads.
Despite grim conversation about recent invasive species sightings and the slow death of the lone surviving plant in a species, the mood was bright. It reminded me of something Ching had said atop Kaala about how she's able to stay optimistic in the face of small disappointments—like seeing the damage to an outplanting site—and big ones: that despite her best efforts, she is witness to the extinction of species. "I can get really depressed about it, but I would say I come to work more positive than anything," she says, "because we feel like we're really making a difference, like every little bit counts."
For the next month, Honolulu Beerworks will list PEPP and Lyon as partners on their website, and visitors to the brewpub will be able to donate directly to conservation efforts. Honolulu Beerworks co-owner Geoff Seideman says that the partnership with local businesses and nonprofits is a no-brainer. "We make good beer and we do good things," he says.
The partners hope that their efforts can help people reconnect with these remarkable plants while also protecting them. If their hunch is right, they'll be able to conserve the sweet haha and other lobeliads, preserving their stories for the future.
