Poor Knights Spleenwort On the Forty-Fours, Chatham Islands Group
The Acutely Threatened (National Critical) Poor Knights Spleenwort (Asplenium pauperequitum) has just been recognised from a herbarium collection of vascular plants made during February 2005 from the remote Forty-fours, east of the main Chatham Islands. The Forty-fours are so small they are not even figured by the current topographic map for the islands. Prior to this discovery Poor Knights Spleenwort was only known from an old collection made from two island groups in the Hauraki Gulf, off the east coast of Northland: the Mokohinau Islands (where it is probably extinct) and the Poor Knights Islands, where it has a rather precarious existence. The Forty-fours collection was made by Mr Mark Bellingham, and the species identified by New Zealand Department of Conservation Threatened Plants Scientist, Peter J. de Lange. The identification has also been confirmed by the man who named the species in 1984, Dr Patrick Brownsey of the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa Herbarium (WELT). The discovery has been hailed as the "Fern find of the year" by New Zealand Pteridologists