Alex Harris | (TNS) Miami Herald MIAMI — Key Largo has a new, disturbing and first-of-its-kind graveyard. There are no headstones, no burial markers, no names, no bodies. It’s the last place an incredibly rare species of tree called the Key Largo tree was seen alive, back in 2023.
The killer? All the clues point to climate change. At least, that’s what a newly published paper suggests. Scientists have been watching this particular stand of cacti — known for their height (up to 20 feet) and brown hairlike puffball they grow around their flowers — since the 1990s.
At the time, researchers determined that a two-acre patch in John Pennekamp State Park was the only population in the U.S. of Pilosocereus millspaughii, an offshoot from the larger Caribbean population of the cactus.
But as of last year, the very last of the bunch is gone. And researchers believe sea level rise was the main culprit — rising tides and groundwater turning the soil too salty for the plant to survive. It appears this local extinction (also known as extirpation) could be the first climate-driven demise of a species in the United States.
“As far as we know, from any published research we can find, this is the first case we can find,” same James Lange, lead botanist with Fairchild Tropical Botanical Gardens and co-author of the study, which was published Tuesday in the Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas. “It was tragic to see as we monitored this over the years,” he said.