Race against time: how scientists are saving south africa’s “ugly duckling daisy” from extinction

In 2006, botanist Ismail Ebrahim made a heartbreaking discovery in South Africa’s shrinking renosterveld shrublands near Cape Town. His team found just 27 surviving plants of Marasmodes undulata, a small yellow daisy that had been presumed extinct for decades. The last known population of 200 individuals had disappeared from the same Paarl region site in the 1980s, making this tiny remnant population humanity’s last chance to save the species.

Faced with an ecological emergency, Ebrahim’s team from the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) took a desperate gamble. Competing vegetation was strangling the rare daisies, so the scientists deliberately set controlled fires to clear the area—a natural process these fire-adapted plants had evolved to depend on. Initially, their strategy seemed to backfire spectacularly. No new M. undulata plants emerged after the first burn, and even when some finally appeared in later years, the population continued its relentless decline. “Every time we went back to the site, we found less plants,” Ebrahim recalls.

Though easily dismissed as an “ugly duckling daisy”—as the late botanist Donovan Kirkwood fondly called it—this unremarkable flower plays a crucial role in its ecosystem. Like removing a block from a Jenga tower, losing even small species like M. undulata weakens the entire renosterveld ecosystem, making it more vulnerable to collapse. The race to decode the secret life of this rare plant and successfully reintroduce it represents a broader challenge facing conservationists worldwide: understanding the complex needs of endangered species before it’s too late.