Te pua o te Rēinga clusters discovered by a Greater Wellington contractor in the Wainuiomata Water Collection Area. Photo: Greater Wellington
Aotearoa's only parasitic plant has been rediscovered in Wainuiomata, after wild populations of the species were thought to be extinct from the region for more than a century.
Te pua o te Rēinga, also known as wood rose or Dactylanthus taylorii, is endemic and critically threatened.
Seeds from the King Country were translocated to the Wellington five years ago, but the last documented observation of a wild population was in Kaitoke in 1914.
It was recently discovered by accident. Greater Wellington Regional Council ecosystems and community manager and Rōpū Tiaki co-chair David Boone said a bird specialist working for council stumbled across several clusters in an area closed to the public.
"Our contractor spotted the plants close to a bird count station we have been surveying annually for the last two decades," Boone said.
But the plants were not in a healthy condition - more like relics of a remnant population.
A Te pua o te Rēinga tuber. Photo: Greater Wellington
Further monitoring was needed to understand its size and health, and what could be done to preserve it.
"The forest in the Wainuiomata water collection area is largely unchanged since Europeans arrived in New Zealand and includes the largest and most pristine lowland forest in the lower North Island," Boone said.
"It is a habitat for native bird species like tītipounamu (rifleman) and kiwi, and now one of New Zealand's rarest plants."
A fenced sanctuary had been floated for construction within the catchment, but so far struggled for funding.
The council wrote a letter to conservation minister Tama Potaka when he took on the portfolio, putting the sanctuary on his radar, but so far no funding had been set aside.
The working group responsible for translocating Te pua o te Rēinga seeds to Zealandia and Ōtari-Wilton's bush in 2020 has reconvened to work with the regional council, Wellington City Council and the Department of Conservation to develop a co-management plan for the re-discovered wild population; made up of representatives from the region's six iwi: Rangitāne o Wairarapa, Ngāti Kahungunu, Taranaki Whānui, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Āti Awa ki Whakarongotai and Raukawa.
Te pua o te Rēinga male and female flowers. Photo: Nga Manu Nature Reserve / David Mudge
Amber Craig, the pou rautaki whenua for Rangitāne o Wairarapa, and a member of the working group, said the rediscovery was "very exciting for us as a collective mana whenua rōpū".
"Preserving the whakapapa of these plants is important, and we can only do that by listening to our pūrākau, looking at the intrinsic relationships Te pua o te Rēinga has with other species, and working together holistically to support the entire ecosystem," she said.
Te pua o te Rēinga was a spiritual plant that "has brought us all together and shown us what kotahitanga looks like," she said.
Department of Conservation operations manager and an expert on Te pua o te Rēinga, Avi Holzapfel, said these individual plants could live for decades, and with protection from predators like possums and rats, they would hopefully begin to seed again.
"The parasitic nature of Te pua o te Rēinga means the plant is fully dependent on host trees; therefore, all conservation efforts need to take the wider forest into account as well; regular pest control carried out by Greater Wellington helped the population survive."
Short-tailed bats, pekapeka, were a known pollinator of Te pua o te Rēinga. - and acoustic monitoring along the nearby Pākuratahi River in early 2024 had detected a new population.
"As short-tailed bats can range over 40km during a single night's feeding, it is quite possible that bats have visited, fed on, and pollinated the newly discovered population in the past, and hopefully will do so again," Holzapfel said.
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