In this unlikely place, researchers are putting the seeds from flowering plants and trees in a sleeplike state called suspended animation. Many years from now, other workers will rouse the slumbering plant embryos and plant them where they’re most needed.

These seeds are like the legendary Rip van Winkle, who fell asleep under a tree and woke up 20 years later. The small farm, called the Greenbelt Native Plant Center, is part of a global effort to save threatened plants and trees.

Around the world, workers are collecting seeds from native plants for long-term storage. The worker above is gathering salt marsh grasses on New York’s Staten Island.

Greenbelt Native Plant Center

Around the world, native plants are being crowded out by invasive newcomers, which can hitch rides on boats, planes, and trains. Unaware of the consequences, people sometimes even plant invasive species because they seem useful or pretty at first.

Adding insult to injury, native plants have less room to grow now as a result of the growth and spread of cities. And global warming is making some places hotter, drier, or otherwise different from what native plants are used to.

Bittersweet peril

American bittersweet is a good example of a plant in peril and one whose seeds should be stored, says Steven Clemants, vice president for science at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York City. The plant, a climbing vine with orange berries, is native to the eastern United States. But an evil twin called Oriental bittersweet is elbowing it out of the way.

People brought Oriental bittersweet to the United States in the 1860s because gardeners loved its fall display of yellow leaves and orange berries. Too late, they realized that the imported beauty was really a beast. The thorn-studded invader can wrap itself around trees and slowly kill them. Now, the transplant is threatening to replace its harmless native counterpart.

In New York City, among other places, an invasive species called Oriental bittersweet (below) is rapidly replacing the native American bittersweet (above). The two plants may look alike, but the invader is far more destructive.

Millennium Seed Bank Project

Millennium Seed Bank Project

Experts used to think that it was impossible to protect big-city plants such as American bittersweet because growth space is limited in urban environments. Crowding increases competition between natives and invaders, and the aggressive aliens often win the battle.

But botanists are now teaming up and fighting back. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden is trying to identify all of the estimated 1,000 plant species that grow within 50 miles of New York City. So far, workers at the Greenbelt Native Plant Center have gathered seeds from about 300 of those plants, says Edward Toth, the center’s director.

The seeds are being kept in storage compartments at the Greenbelt Center. Some are also being held as part of an international collection in Europe.

When planted in the future, these seeds could help restore damaged parklands and forests. Revived plants could also protect reservoirs of drinking water by filtering out pollution.

Sleeping seeds

The New York project is getting storage tips from the Millennium Seed Bank, a project in the United Kingdom run by the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens. Michael Way, a coordinator with the British project, says that the most important step is to collect seeds at exactly the right time— when they are just about ready to fall from the plant.

At the Greenbelt Native Plant Center, some seed collections are air-dried before entering special chambers to be cooled, dried, and stored.

Greenbelt Native Plant Center

Workers then store the seeds at a constant temperature of 59º Fahrenheit (15º Celsius) while slowly drying them in specially designed chambers. The temperature and humidity in the chambers is similar to that on a fall night in the southern Arizona desert.

After the seeds dry, they can enter a state of suspended animation when stored at a frosty –4ºF (–20ºC). That’s like January in northern Minnesota.

How long can chilled seeds survive? “There’s a huge variation between species,” Way said.

A worker checks on containers of seeds at a storage facility run by the Millennium Seed Bank Project in England. She is bundled up because the seeds are stored at a frosty –4ºF (–20ºC).

Millennium Seed Bank Project

Some seeds last only 30 years, while others can “sleep” for up to 10,000 years! If stored properly, Way says, seeds from 90 percent of the plants that grow in the New York area should last 200 years or more.

Sprouting toward the future

The Millennium Seed Bank, Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Greenbelt Native Plant Center are among many contributors to a national project called Seeds of Success, run by the U.S. government.

The government manages about 600 million acres of land—nearly one-fourth the area of the entire United States, including Hawaii and Alaska. Invasive plants are taking over much of that land, says Peggy Olwell, a botanist with the government’s Bureau of Land Management. To make things worse, forest fires in the western United States are destroying more vegetation than they used to.

Seeds of Success workers have been collecting seeds in the prairies, deserts, and mountains of the West since 2001. Now, they’re doing the same thing on the East Coast. Organizations in Chicago, Texas, and elsewhere are pitching in with seeds from their areas.

This pink-colored Pinxterbloom Azalea bush on New York’s Staten Island is one of the plants whose seeds will be collected by the Millennium Seed Bank Project.

Millennium Seed Bank Project

Collecting seeds for storage can be challenging. Sometimes, human seed collectors have to compete with insects and other animals that like to eat seeds and the fruits that contain them.

Some plants are very delicate, and the workers have to sneak up on them. Consider, for example, the narrowleaf four o’clock. Each of this prairie plant’s pink flowers produces a single seed that can fall off with the slightest breeze—or sneeze.

The hard work is paying off. So far, more than three dozen collection teams assisting Seeds of Success have helped stash away seeds from some 3,000 flowering plant species. In all, about 18,000 to 20,000 flowering species grow in North America north of the Mexican border.

Some of the seeds will be frozen and put into long-term storage at U.S. Department of Agriculture facilities in Colorado and Washington State. Other seeds will be kept cold until they can be given to growers, researchers and agencies that request them.

The Department of Agriculture has a lot of experience banking seeds. The government agency manages more than 480,000 collections of seeds in 21 separate facilities. Altogether, these banked seeds represent nearly 12,500 different species. Most of them have the potential to become crops.

A scientist with the Millennium Seed Bank studies the types of growing conditions that revived plant seeds prefer.

Millennium Seed Bank Project

The Millennium Seed Bank is also huge. Earlier this year, the number of seeds in this international collection reached 1 billion. The billionth seed came from an African bamboo plant that produces seeds only once every 7 years.

The international project aims to store seeds from one-tenth of the world’s flowering plants, or about 30,000 species, by 2010. After that, there will still be enough room to stockpile seeds from half of the world’s flowering plant species.

With the right care, the leafy Rip van Winkles should be around for a very long time.

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I had scanned a large, plant-filled enclosure several times before locating him: a 70-something-year-old tortoise named Lonesome George. The tortoise weighs 88 kilograms (nearly 200 pounds), but he was barely visible beyond several bushes, and his head and legs were tucked neatly within his shell.

An adult Galápagos tortoise lumbers within a semiprotected space at a breeding facility on San Cristobal Island.

Bryn Nelson

Like a stubborn child who refuses to leave his room, George is not the most sociable tortoise in the world. But he’s by far the most famous, and I was happy to spot him—or at least his shell. That’s because George is the last known member of his species, sometimes called the Pinta tortoise.

A special place

George lives in the Galápagos Islands, a group of 19 islands in the Pacific Ocean about 600 miles (a little less than 1,000 km) west of Ecuador. The islands are famous for their unique plants and animals. For example, many of the islands’ lizards, iguanas, tortoises, sea lions, seabirds, land birds called finches, and even a type of penguin, have been found nowhere else in the world.

Recent reports, however, suggest that many species in the Galápagos are in trouble. Scientists blame the growing problem on too much tourism, too many people moving to the islands, and the introduction of foreign plants and animals that are crowding out or killing native species.

Based on satellite photographs taken by NASA, this image shows the major islands in the Galápagos.

Wikipedia/NASA

But researchers and volunteers are working hard to save threatened animals such as the tortoises. Using a range of strategies, from radio collar–wearing goats to analyses of old tortoise bones, they are making a difference—and showing that a shy survivor named George may not be so alone after all.

The rarest creature

Before humans first arrived in the Galápagos Islands in the 1500s, 15 or more closely related tortoise species may have lived there. Twelve of those species still inhabit the islands, but two are extinct. Lonesome George is the last known member of the third.

A Galápagos tortoise shares a morning bath with a white-cheeked pintail in a duckweed-covered pool in Santa Cruz Island’s highlands.

Bryn Nelson

Scientists found George living alone on an island in the Galápagos called Pinta Island in the early 1970s. Because he is the last remaining Pinta tortoise that scientists know about, the Guinness Book of World Records has called him the “rarest living creature.”

I recently took a weeklong voyage through the Galápagos aboard a motor-powered yacht named the Letty. Aboard the boat, I met wildlife photographer Tui De Roy, who told me that several tortoise species were in even worse shape when she was a girl.

De Roy moved to the Galápagos Islands when she was 2 and lived there for more than 35 years. Now a resident of New Zealand, she helps oversee the Charles Darwin Foundation.

The foundation operates the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island in the Galápagos. Scientists at the station advise the Ecuadorian government on how best to protect the Galápagos Islands.

By some estimates, De Roy says, up to 500,000 tortoises were killed for food or taken away as pets in the centuries before concerned people began protecting them. By the time preservation efforts began, perhaps only one-tenth of the original population remained.

Laws now protect the tortoises from hunting, but the lure of money still drives some people to kill the tortoises and sell their meat. Galápagos tortoises also face new dangers from animals that didn’t originally live on the islands, including goats.

Pesky goats

Over the past few centuries, fishers, pirates, sailors, and settlers brought goats to the Galápagos as a reliable food source. Unfortunately for tortoises, goats like the same types of grasses, fruits and leaves as tortoises do, and the goats are faster movers.

As the goats multiply, they beat tortoises to prime grazing spots. And they trample other favorite tortoise foods, like young prickly pear cacti.

As they stomp around, the hoofed animals can also squash sandy areas near the shoreline where tortoises build their nests. Over time, huge herds of goats can turn leafy forests into barren grassland.

This mural on the island of San Cristobal reads, “These introduced vertebrate animals are a menace in the Galápagos.” Pictured are a rat, cat, dog, pig, and goat—among the most destructive newcomers in the Galápagos Islands.

Bryn Nelson

Researchers have used helicopters, dogs, and even other goats to track down the goat invaders. The tracker goats wear radio collars that allow scientists and hunters to follow them as they mingle with wild goats. The researchers also put bright paint on the tracker goats, so hunters know to leave them alone but to nab their wild companions.

Goats be gone

The antigoat campaign has been paying off. Last year, researchers removed the last of an estimated 75,000 to 125,000 wild goats from the northern part of Isabela Island, which boasts more tortoise species than any other island in the Galápagos.

The victory built upon earlier successes on several other islands. On an island named Española, thousands of goats were removed in the 1970s, De Roy says. By then, the island’s native tortoise population had dwindled to 12 adult females and 2 males.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, researchers evacuated those few surviving tortoises to the Charles Darwin Research Station some 60 miles away. There, they set up an emergency-breeding program.

This male tortoise was once kept illegally as a pet. Now, he stretches out at the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island.

Bryn Nelson

A third male tortoise from Española, named Macho, was already living at the San Diego Zoo. Scientists later brought him to the research station to help restore the island population. The descendants of Española have now helped resettle more than 1,400 tortoises on their goatfree native soil.

“Española is one of the most beautiful stories” of tortoise success, says Gisella Caccone, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University.

A stunning find

Earlier this year, Caccone and her colleagues announced another stunning discovery: Lonesome George may not be alone after all.

The discovery began with a routine study of the genetic material known as DNA. Every animal’s DNA is different, but researchers can look for common patterns among members of the same species that distinguish them from other species. A crow’s DNA, for example, looks significantly different from a hawk’s DNA, even though both creatures are birds.

First, Caccone’s team extracted a sample of DNA from George’s blood. The researchers also took DNA from the bones of long-dead Pinta tortoises that had been stashed away in museums for decades. By looking at samples of both living and dead specimens, the scientists came up with a profile of a typical Pinta’s DNA.

Next, the team compared the Pinta DNA with DNA from tortoises living on neighboring Isabela Island. They already knew the Isabela population had a mixed heritage, and they wanted to know more about where the ancestors of the Isabela tortoises had come from.

Their results surprised them. One young Isabela male tortoise, the scientists learned, shared half of George’s DNA. Caccone says that this discovery suggests that the youngster’s mom was likely born on Isabela Island. But his dad, like George, originally lived on Pinta Island, about 50 miles away.

No one knows how the tortoise father made the trip to Isabela. It’s possible that he and others rode to their new home with sailors or settlers, or on strong ocean currents. Unlike sea turtles, tortoises live only on land. Even so, tortoises have been known to survive for long periods in the ocean, whether floating by themselves or clinging to mats of vegetation. Some researchers, in fact, believe the first tortoises to arrive in the Galápagos Islands did so by floating westward from the mainland.

Either way, the new find has researchers hoping they’ll be able to identify more Pinta tortoises now living on Isabela—or at least tortoises that are partly descended from Lonesome George’s extended family. If they can find both males and females with Pinta DNA, scientists will start a new breeding program to pass on as much of that unique DNA to tortoise hatchlings as possible. If they’re really lucky, their breeding program may help the Pinta species survive. George, who seems completely uninterested in reproducing, would be off the hook.

These tortoise hatchlings are a few years old. Here, they seek shelter from the heat at the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island in the Galápagos. Researchers have bred these hatchlings in captivity and will release them into the wild

Bryn Nelson

Caccone’s group has done more than revive the hope of rescuing Pinta Island tortoises from the brink of extinction. Two years ago, the team also discovered a previously unknown species of tortoise on Santa Cruz Island, where most people in the Galápagos Islands live. The isolated population of about 100 tortoises still doesn’t have a formal name.

“The Galápagos can yield an incredible amount of new surprises,” Caccone says. “Think what you can find when you really study well the other islands.”

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