
Botanists rediscover rare Hawaiian flower thought extinct, thanks to a drone - pseudolus
https://qz.com/1600255/botanists-are-using-drones-to-rediscover-extinct-flowers/
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misnome
It’s nice to read a story about rare plants or insects that doesn’t include
the words “after they collected it...”.

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anitil
Or descriptions of how delicious they are :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_tortoise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_tortoise)

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umvi
I really want to try tortoise meat now

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monksy
This is an interesting idea:

Our catalog of active and extinct organisms is considered to be: "That we
observed" What that translates into: The organism has adapted to a new
environment. (Pretty cool)

it would be interesting to have a shared system (like a Kafka system) to
report sightings and alerts about extinct animals/plants. This would help with
an automated approach.

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mjevans
Do we have well preserved genetic samples so that when cloning or synthesis
technology gets better the flower can be reproduced that way?

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ip26
They provided an awful lot of information on where exactly it was found.
Haven't we learned not to provide poachers such a nice little map of where to
find <rare organism>?

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penagwin
Based on the terrain you're going to have a heck of a time getting there. I'm
not really sure what the value would be selling it, you'd either need to sell
fast or have the knowledge to keep it alive, even then you still have to fence
it.

The only people I could really see messing with it would be trolls that just
want to destroy a nearly extinct flower, but that terrain would surely be off-
putting for most if not all.

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chrsstrm
You're assuming a human would try and physically approach and remove it. It
was discovered by a drone, why wouldn't a poacher use a drone to retrieve it?

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penagwin
I don't know what the sorrounding terrain looks like, but from person
experience it is expensive to buy the longer range transmitters you'll likely
need for this (~1000$+ transportation to there).

But since I don't think the flower holds much black market value, your only
real motivation would be just to be a jerk. And you'd have to be really trying
too.

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bigiain
It's fairly straightforward to get a drone there. (Even regular off-the-shelf
2.4GHz RC gear and 5GHz video gear will happily get that sort of distance
line-of-sight with relatively inexpensive high gain antennas). I'd bet any of
the mid or high end consumer DJI drones could get there and take pictures of
it.

It's much much more difficult to put together a drone that's capable of
pulling a plant out of a piece of rocky ground reliably without damaging it.
You can't buy that from DJI. UI doubt you can buy that from _anyone_. It
_might_ be possible by mounting a consumer-grade robot arm on a commercially
available drone. But you'd be building/programming/testing it yourself, and at
that range in that terrain most failure modes probably mean you won't get your
drone-capable-of-carrying-a-robot-arm-and-exotic-plant back.

