The carnivorous plant Drosera magnifica was discovered due to a Facebook post!

We might not generally be very big fans of Facebook over here, but it has one thing that Steemit has yet to achieve; discovering a new species to science! During a hike in 2012, a Brazilian amateur botanist named Reginaldo Vasconcelos posted a photograph of a carnivorous plant he found. He did not know what species it was, which is not all that strange considering the fact that no one had described it before.

Image by Paulo Gonella, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

A year passed by without anything happening, but then Paulo Gonella came across the photo and saw what he believed to be a new plant. He got in contact with Vasconcelos, and together they hiked back to the location of the plant. After researching it, Gonella and a few coworkers were able to publish the results that indeed confirmed it to be a new species.

The new plant was named Drosera magnifica, meaning magnificent sundew, and as you might guess from the name, belongs to the family of sundews, which are all specialized to get their nutrients from killing prey. The family consists of almost 200 different species, and they are found in most parts of the world, and I have seen two species here in Norway as well (however, these are much smaller than the ones found in warmer climate; see Drosera rotundifolia and D. longifolia).

Anyway, D. magnifica is extremely rare, and the IUCN has it categorized as Critically Endangered. There might of course be more plants from the species high in the Brazilian mountains somewhere, but so far it seems like there’s only a few ones alive.

The power of sharing

Due to this unique discovery, it has been coined as the first new species to be discovered on social media, and I think this is a good example of how staying connected with people from all around the world will improve our lives. It’s just amazing that someone posted a photo of it, and a year later a scientists stumbles across it and find it to be a new species.

In addition to helping scientists discover new species, social media has been used to map the habitat range of other species. By finding geotagged pictures of plants and animals, researchers have saved a lot of money on mapping the habitat of species, since they don’t need to spend weeks or even months to look for them in uncertain places themselves. This will of course not replace actual field work, but I think it’s a nice addition to help us learn more about species that we would not be able to learn otherwise.

When will we get our first Steemit organism?

The next step for Steemit to grow is obviously to get our own scientific discovery! Let’s all go out and hunt for strange plants and other organisms, and hope an alpha taxonomist is following your account!

Thanks for reading

Thanks for reading about the first species that was discovered by social media. If you are interested in learning more, then this article by Smithsonian.com is an interesting read. The actual paper with the description of the plant is behind a paywall, but you can read the abstract for free by following the link. The Wikipedia article also has some more sources if you’re interested. I hope you enjoyed the read, and make sure to leave a comment below!