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The rarest fern in Europe has been discovered in Killarney, Ireland, leaving botanists baffled by how it remained undetected for so long.
The neotropical fern, Myosuroid stenogrammitis, has only been found previously in the mountainous cloud forests of Jamaica, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, more than 4,000 miles across the Atlantic.
Rory Hodd, an Irish-based botanist who saw the small plant in a remote highland valley far from the nearest road, said: “It is rare to discover a new species of plant native to Britain and Ireland, one that we believe It came ‘on its own steam’, not imported by humans, but it is frankly surprising to discover a genre that is completely new to Europe. “
The tiny fern appears to have been overlooked for thousands of years as it lay quietly in Killarney National Park in County Kerry, one of the last remaining patches of temperate rainforest in Europe.
Hodd was hunting plants when he discovered some specimens of ferns growing on wet rocks. He picked up, pressed one, and sent it to Fred Rumsey, Senior Curator of the Natural History Museum, London.
Working with American colleagues who are experts on these plants, Rumsey identified the little fern as part of a distinctive group known as Grammitids, a rare variety that generally grows on trees in the tropics. Their findings have been published in British and Irish Botany, the journal of the Botanical Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
“The closest occurrences we have of these Grammitid ferns are in the mid-Atlantic, in the Azores, where there are two extremely rare species that have recently been listed as critically endangered,” Rumsey said.
It is unlikely that people brought the tiny fern to Ireland because Grammitid ferns have proven impossible to grow and this fern grows on rocks rather than other plants, so it would not be accidentally introduced into tropical garden plants.
Scientists believe that most likely Myosuroid stenogrammitis It is a relic from thousands of years ago when there was a very different climate and it quietly thrived on Europe’s smooth Atlantic fringe.
Hodd said: “It also highlights the immense value of the temperate oceanic rainforest, a habitat that is now largely lost and highly degraded, as a refuge for a wide range of species that would not survive without its protection.”
It has been suggested that Kerry’s mouse tail is a common name for Europe’s rarest fern, although Hodd pointed out that the name did not capture a small fern’s seemingly miraculous ability to confuse expectations and leap across oceans.
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