3. Charisma and Character: Incas the Carolina Parakeet, Turgi the Tree Snail, and Wood’s Cycad

They said he died of a broken heart.

On Thursday, February 21, 1918, Incas, the last Carolina parakeet, passed away at the Cincinnati Zoo, surrounded by his keepers. A few months earlier, in the summer of 1917, Incas’s companion of decades, the almost-endling parakeet Lady Jane, had died and by the keepers’ accounts, Incas was bereft without her.1

Incas and Lady Jane were members of the only parrot (parakeet) species endemic to the United States—Conuropsis carolinensis. These were social, gregarious birds. Early accounts by European explorers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mention the parrot, marveling at its colors—green, yellow, and red-orange. For centuries, the birds were seen in large flocks—sometimes hundreds of birds strong—living in moss-covered sycamores and cypress trees in river-bottom forests of the southern United States.

By the late nineteenth century, however, reports of parakeet sightings in the wild were rare, as their habitat was destroyed by agricultural practices that reshaped the parakeets’ natural environments. The birds were considered pests to large plantation farms—they ate crops—and they were exterminated as such. Some biologists have suggested that the hollow trees the birds used for nests were invaded by European honeybees, putting more pressure on the dwindling bird populations.2 What’s more, “the turn of the [twentieth-]century ladies’ fashion fancied hats decorated with flashy feathers and sometimes even whole stuffed birds,” environmental historian Mikko Saikku points out.3 For over a century, all of these stresses built up for the species, meaning that there were fewer and fewer parakeets in shrinking habitats and that the species was moving closer to extinction.

In the mid-1880s, a consignment of sixteen parakeets arrived at the zoo in Cincinnati. Over the years, this endling flock of Carolina parakeets died off—none of the chicks that hatched at the zoo survived to adulthood—until just Incas and Lady Jane were left. Here and there, sightings of Carolina parakeets in the wild were reported, but none were verified.

When Incas the endling died, it was just a few cages over from where another endling—Martha, the very last passenger pigeon—had passed away four years prior.4

Dying of a broken heart is a story that has long permeated the art and literary worlds.

It’s not much of a stretch, for example, to think of Incas and Lady Jane as an avian version of the Tristan and Isolde Arthurian legend. (Tristan and Isolde’s story is that of two tragic lovers who share a forbidden passion; when Tristan dies, Isolde immediately dies of grief alongside him.) While such anthropomorphizing helps tell the story of the two birds, it doesn’t have the narrative breadth to consider the centuries of habitat destruction and hunting pressures that the Carolina parakeet had faced, factors that caused the extinction of the species. What it does, however, is offer a relatable—sentimental?—story for the deaths of the last two of these birds. This relatability, in turn, helps us tell some animal stories, like Incas and Lady Jane’s, more easily than others.

This begs the question: What animals, what species, do we tell extinction stories about and why? Why do animals—well, certain animals—offer such compelling, charismatic endlings and endling stories? And why do other organisms, like plants and protozoa, not? At least, not yet?

Parrots, thylacines, rhinoceroses, ibex, river dolphins, and even parakeets—these are all animals that we might call charismatic in their popular appeal. These are all animals that are easy for we humans to anthropomorphize and rally behind. Charismatic animals offer a “sympathetic face” (or, in terms of storytelling, a sympathetic character) for public audiences. It’s easy to want to save panda bears and elephants; it’s harder to convince people to care as urgently about the critically endangered venomous Sahul reef snake.

In 2018, a team of conservation biologists determined that “the public”—such that they are—considered the following animals to be the top ten charismatic animals on the planet to be: tigers (Panthera tigris), lions (Panthera. leo), elephants (Loxodonta africana, Loxodont cyclotis, and Elephas maximus), giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis), leopards (Panthera. pardus), pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus), polar bears (Ursus maritimus), gray wolves (Canis lupus), and gorillas (Gorilla beringei and Gorilla gorilla).5 They did point out that while invertebrates (like spiders and butterflies), cephalopods (like an octopus), and animals without fur did not rank—and often don’t for conservation fundraising—there are many species that have a “local charisma” that impacts their own local conservation efforts.

Because charismatic animals—which we tend to associate with giant, furry megafauna—are often species in apex positions in their ecosystems (like wolves or big cats), it’s easy to understand how and why their extinction would wreak havoc on their ecosystems. (For example, an apex predator can keep prey populations under control in an ecosystem.) Not only are they charismatic, such thinking goes, their ecological role is quite visible.

In conservation circles, charismatic animals are often “flagships” for other, less popular animals. While this notion doesn’t carry much ecological weight—the way “umbrella” or “keystone” species does—it certainly matters within wildlife fundraising. “The flagship species approach is an enduring strategy in conservation,” geographers Paul Jepson and Maan Barua point out, emphasizing that these charismatic animals “capture the attention of stakeholders and publics in ways that generate forms of support leading to positive conservation outcomes.”6

And the cost? Is there a cost to species when we humans determine them to be “charismatic”?

“Some species can be the victims of their charisma, especially invertebrates which are not considered by the public as sensitive,” biologists Frédéric Ducarme, Gloria Luque, and Franck Courchamp write. Which is to say that lots of rare and endangered species with a shape or color that strikes humans’ fancy can be collected by tourists as souvenirs, or by local people to be sold to tourists as part of the “curios trade.” This leads to rapid local extinctions of “charismatic” species. “This is especially the case of sessile beings like beautiful, endangered flowers (like the edelweiss Leontopodium alpinum), expensive edible mushrooms, or even sea stars and shellfishes,” the three biologists point out. “For example, overfishing of the beautiful conch gastropod Charonia tritonis is often alleged as a probable cause for its prey’s wrenching outbreaks, the coral-eating sea star Acanthaster planci.”7 In other words, the species we value—to save or to tell stories about—impacts other species in their ecosystems.

The living, working ways that we interact with animals have very real repercussions. It becomes self-reinforcing that the animals—the endlings—whose stories we tell reinforce how we see animals. Such anthropocentrism (anthropomorphism, really) lets us ascribe characteristics and personas to animals that do not necessarily exist. (For example, snakes are not innately malevolent; monkeys are not always clever; crabs are not necessarily grumpy; snails are not proxies for sloth.) With so much species’ extinctions—with so many endlings—which stories do we choose to tell?

Because it’s easy to find literary themes and story tropes in charismatic animals, endlings that fit that sort of animal storytelling are given stories that are told and retold. When an endling is an animal of a species that humans “like,” then the stories of Incas, Benjamin, or Celia easily resonate. “The fact that people tend to attach little sensitiveness to most invertebrates may also be seen as a limit to the use of charismatic species to help conservation programs,” biologists Frédéric Ducarme, Gloria Luque, and Franck Courchamp point out.8

It’s a cliché to point out that snails are slow, but the tiny tree snail species Partula turgida moved at less than two feet per year. Endemic to the Polynesian archipelago in the South Pacific (officially named Archipel de la Société; Tōtaiete mā in Tahitian; Society Islands in English), the Partula genus of tree snails lived and evolved in Polynesia over a million years.

Indeed, by the mid-twentieth century there were more than one hundred and twenty Polynesian tree snail species spread out over the archipelago. All Partula snail species are tiny—only a centimeter or two in size—and graze on algae from the surface of leaves in forests or consume dead vegetation, like decaying leaf stalks of hibiscus plants.9 As detritivores, these snails are able to recycle nutrients in their ecosystems and assist with plants’ respiration.

However slowly the tree snails might have crawled in life, their extinction was swift and decisive. On Wednesday, January 1, 1996, the last Polynesian tree snail from the Partula turgida species died in the London Zoo. The snail—known as Turgi to the zoo’s staff—was part of a captive breeding program to try to help that snail species, and others, found endemically in Polynesia. When Turgi died in London, he was almost 10,000 miles from home. A zoo spokesperson was quoted as saying the tombstone for Turgi would read “1.5 million years BC to January 1996.”10

Partula snails have been culturally significant to Polynesia for centuries. Shells were used in making jewelry and ornamentation; islands had different species of Partula, each with its own distinct shell pattern lending themselves to different social networks along the islands. The snails were documented by English naturalist Joseph Banks, who was on board Captain James Cook’s first voyage of the HMS Endeavour. For over a century, scientists have studied the adaptions and distributions of Partula species, because isolated habitats of the South Pacific islands provide an opportunity to study evolution, much like the Galápagos, as islands are epicenters of biodiversity and evolution. “They are the Darwin finches of the snail world,” Paul Pearce-Kelly, a senior Zoological Society of London curator, offered of the various Partula species in a 2019 interview with The Guardian.11

Although habitat loss during the twentieth century put pressure on the tree snail species, the real extinction crisis for Partula turgida began when French authorities introduced giant African snails (Lissachatina fulica or Achatina fulica) to the islands for foodstuffs in 1967. (The islands are still part of French Polynesia, part of the French Republic, thus subject to French authority.) The giant snails escaped, they bred, and they began to destroy local crops on the islands. In short, the introduced snails were out of control.

To combat the feral populations of giant African snails, authorities imported another, different carnivorous snail species—Euglandina rosea, or the rosy wolf snail—in the 1970s. Endemic to the southern United States, specifically Florida, the wolf snail was introduced to Hawai’i in 1955 to try and control a different outbreak of giant African snails; in that instance, the rosy wolf snail was responsible for the extinction of eight species of snail native to Hawai’i.12 (The rosy wolf snail was known as “the Exocet of the snail world,” the Evening Standard reported in 1996. The International Union for Conservation of Nature currently lists Euglandina rosea as one of the world’s top one hundred most invasive species.13) Unsurprisingly, the rosy wolf snail quickly wreaked havoc on the Polynesian Partula species. Within a decade of its introduction, Euglandina rosea had wiped out twenty-seven endemic tree snail species. Today, scientists estimate that the rosy wolf snail is responsible for wiping out more than half of the Partula species that had once been spread over the entire archipelago.14

In 1991, Paul Pearce-Kelly and colleagues at the Zoological Society of London captured the last known individuals of P. turgida (in addition to other snails from similarly threatened Partula species, as they had on many collection trips) to create a breeding program for the snails at the London Zoo. By 1994, the snails in the program began dying, and veterinary pathologist Andrew Cunningham of the Institute of Zoology in London and then-parasitologist Peter Daszak of Kingston University in Kingston-upon-Thames, England, began looking into possible causes. The population of captive P. turgida snails dwindled from 296 individuals to fewer than ten.

Postmortems on five of the tree snails showed that they were full of protozoan-like spores in their digestive glands and reproductive tracts, suggesting that a parasite had infected the snails. Daszak’s analysis confirmed that the protozoa belonged to the phylum Microsporidia, known to infect aquatic snails; closer inspection revealed that the spores belonged to a new species of microsporidian in the genus Steinhausia. In a bit of evolutionary irony, Steinhausia did not appear to infect other land snails, and by killing off P. turgida, it seemed to have sealed its own fate—although irony means very little to Turgi or his fellow now-extinct snails.15 “Only rarely has the cause of death been established for the last individual of a species and, when known, this usually was due to direct physical harm inflicted by humans,” the scientific report published in Conservation Biology stated. “We believe that this is the first definitive record of an infectious disease causing a population to decline to the point of extinction—albeit this occurred in captivity and that the original decline in the wild was a consequence of human activity.”16

When the spore findings were published, ecologists and other conservation experts noted that the findings should serve as a reminder for how closely captive-breeding programs ought to monitor their populations. (“Captive breeding is not always a safe haven,” Science quoted conservation biologist Stuart Pimm when the results of the snail spore-findings were published.17) They also noted that the spores were a reminder of just how fragile a species was in the wild to be in a captive breeding program to begin with.

When Turgi died, his story made the media rounds. The Evening Standard in London reported that Turgi had been discovered “motionless in its Perspex box.” Newspapers like Los Angeles Times wrote that Turgi “moved at a rate of less than 2 feet a year so it took a while for the curators at London Zoo to be sure it had stopped moving forever.”18 (In the Evening Standard’s 1996 eulogy, Paul Pearce-Kelly was quick to point out that, of course, the zoo knew Turgi had died. “They are not so slow that you cannot tell they are dead.”19) Most reported that the species had been put at risk due to the ill-conceived introduction of not one, but two, invasive snail species.

As an endling, Turgi wasn’t, perhaps, as grandiose as many of his fellow lasts of their species. He wasn’t as furry and charismatic as Benjamin the thylacine, whose death made him a mascot for National Threatened Species Day in Australia. Turgi wasn’t a martyr that tourists visit on eco-pilgrimages, like Sudan the northern white rhino almost-endling. He wasn’t a stately Lonesome George living out his life with gravitas in his own Galápagos islands. Although sad, of course, reports of Turgi’s death were certainly less intentionally pathos-filled than many other eulogies of species’ extinctions; perhaps because it’s harder to anthropomorphize a snail than other charismatic organisms.

But Partula doesn’t end with Turgi. Although Turgi’s species remains extinct, of course, the story of his sister taxa—other Partula species that were part of international breeding programs in Europe and North America—has a different, more hopeful ending. The rosy wolf snail’s population has declined on the islands, and captive breeding programs (including the one that Turgi was part of) have continued their work that began in the mid-1980s. In addition to monitoring the decline of the rosy wolf snail, the programs established predator-free enclosures and safe areas for the preyed-upon Partula.

By 2014, the programs had established robust enough numbers of other Partula species that snails could be repatriated to Polynesia by the thousands to reestablish populations in the wild. “To see these animals released into their historic homeland was a very emotional moment,” Gerardo Garcia, a curator at Chester Zoo and part of the Partula captive breeding project, noted in The Guardian in 2019. “Our planet’s biodiversity is under threat, every single one of those tiny animals now represents a special symbol of hope.”20

As of September 2019, more than 15,000 Partula snails (from fourteen species and subspecies) have been released on the islands of Huahine and Moorea, between Bora Bora and Tahiti. “Partula rosea and varia also have a very strong cultural affinity with the people of Huahine, who traditionally used the shells for making crowns and necklaces for special occasions,” the Zoological Society of London reported in 2019 when the two Partula species that had been extinct in the wild were reintroduced. “Returning the snails to the island is therefore as much a cultural as a conservation celebration.”21

How we think about and use the concept of “charisma” today is a rather recent, twentieth-century phenomena—one that conservation biology has borrowed from political philosophy and sociology. Charisma’s etymological and social history, however, plays a role in the stories, personalities, and even the anthropomorphisms we assign to endangered species, as well as the narratives we draw from to talk about their extinctions and endlings.

The Oxford English Dictionary points out that very early uses of “charisma” come from the Greek “χάρισμα,” although “charisma” does not typically appear in classical Greek or early Christian literature.22 In the context of the New Testament, it refers to “favour given, gift of grace”; it is alternatively defined as “a divinely conferred power or talent.”23 Seventeenth-century English cleric and prelate Richard Montagu referred to the “The Charismata of grace” in his Acts & Monuments, published in 1642; other writers and philosophers prior to the twentieth century kept “charisma” tied to Christian theology and religious institutions.24

The idea that charisma is a “gift and power of leadership and authority”25 comes from the work of German sociologist Max Weber’s 1922 publication Wirtschaft u. Gesellschaft (The Theory of Social and Economic Organization); in what the Oxford English Dictionary calls a “re-borrowing” of the Greek word rather than an evolution of charisma’s original meaning. According to Weber, charisma is “a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.”26 This definition is still in use in social sciences.

Although Weber’s work draws quite a bit from the word’s theological history, he saw charisma acting in two ways through modern, not-necessarily-religious political and social institutions, particularly in regard to the question of leadership, authority, and personality—and not always for the better. The first was that charisma could be “a gift that inheres in an object or person simply by virtue of natural endowment.” (This is where Weber saw instances of charisma being an inherent trait that could not be acquired.) The second was that charisma could be “produced artificially in an object or person through some extraordinary means.” In other words, charisma could be innate, or it could be learned, or it could be assigned.27 Charisma is flexible, but it, inevitably, would have a way to connect charismatic people to audiences.

For conservation biology, “charisma,” as applied to species with popular appeal, began to appear in scientific literature and conservation efforts, especially fundraising, in the mid- to late-twentieth century.28 Here is where species (in particular animal species) could be “charismatic” in appeal outside of traditional folk or fairy tales; and charisma—either innate or assigned—could shape their conservation status going forward. It’s worth noting that there is a well-documented and long-running concern in conservation biology that the use of “charisma” and “charismatic species” does more harm than good for conservation efforts. Biologists like Frédéric Ducarme, Gloria Luque, and Franck Courchamp, for example, point out that many that oppose—critique, really—the application of charisma in biology do so because of “its deceitfulness for the public, its unscientific character, a wider doubt about surrogate strategies efficiency, and a more particular doubt about the relevance of charismatic species as umbrella or keystone species.”29

What does this mean for endlings? It certainly means that it’s easier to tell endling stories about species that we think of as innately charismatic. (What conservation biologists might call the bias toward large, furry vertebrates.) But, going back to Weber’s work with the concept, it’s possible to assign charisma to an individual through “extraordinary means”—perhaps this is what other, overlooked endlings and their stories need.

It’s known in botanical circles as the “loneliest plant.” Only one of its kind has even been found in the wild.

This single, solitary tree—a cycad, to be specific—was discovered in what is now KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, in 1895 by botanist John Medley Wood. The tree—a clump, really, because the tree had several giant trunks and small offsets growing from it—was tucked away on a steep, south-facing slope at the edge of a small granite outcrop in the oNgoye Forest. Wood was the curator of the Durban Botanic Gardens and immediately recognized the cycad’s significance as a new, undescribed cycad species.

Cycads are some of the oldest trees on the planet, evolving some 280 million years ago. These Permian plants grew across the earth’s supercontinent, Pangea; fossils have been found in North and South America, Europe, Australia, and even Antarctica. Specific cycad species have come and gone, but cycads have been part of earth’s natural history for eons. Scientists estimate that during the Jurassic period, cycads made up about 20 percent of the world’s plants, leading some paleontologists to refer to the middle Jurassic as the “Age of Cycads.”30

Cycads are often confused with palm trees, as both plants have scaly trunks and topknots of fronds, but they are not closely related at all. Palm trees are angiosperms—plants that flower and with seeds protected by fruit. Cycads, on the other hand, are gymnosperms—plants whose seeds are exposed in open structures, like conifers that produce a pinecone. Cycads are what botanists call “dioecious,” meaning that different male and female parts are not contained in one cycad plant. In other words, there are male and female cycads, and the species needs both to survive.

It’s hard to see these plants as anything other than evolutionary survivors. It seems that cycads have an adaption for everything. Cycads’ inner seed kernels, for example, are impervious to an elephant’s digestive system. Some seeds can float, perhaps even the distance of an ocean. Growing shoots from a parent plant are protected by fire-resistant leaves. Sometimes the plants can change sex from male to female and vice versa. And they speciate—cycads are constantly producing new subspecies and hybrids.31 Over the course of their evolutionary history, cycads have lived through the Cretaceous catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs, multiple ice ages, as well as the constant speciation of other plants. (These speciations included newer and bigger trees, as well as fruiting and flowering plants.) All of these factors—over hundreds of millions of years—have pushed cycads into smaller and smaller ecological niches.

Today, there are fewer and fewer cycads—just over three hundred extant species—found in the world, where they tend to cluster in tropical and subtropical climes. Many cycad species are in decline, and several are on the brink of extinction. (In South Africa, for example, several cycad species have fewer than a hundred individual plants.32)

Which brings us back to 1895 and the cycad discovered by John Medley Wood. The oNgoye forest is now part of an almost four-thousand-hectare reserve in KwaZulu-Natal, which contains several types of ecotones, depending on altitude, aspect, and soil type. This particular cycad is tall with an intricate pattern on its trunk and bright green fronds; its cones are bright orange in color and each cone can be over a meter in length. In 1903, Wood sent his assistant, James Wylie, to collect some of the smaller offsets from the cycad tree—clump—to be cultivated at the Durban Botanic Gardens. (Wood was a self-trained botanist who was curator of the Durban Botanic Gardens from 1882 until 1913; he also founded the Natal Herbarium in 1882.) This new cycad species was named Encephalartos woodii—commonly called Wood’s cycad—in his honor.33

Despite a century of looking, no other E. woodii individual—more to the point, no female individual—has been found. The cycad plant Wood discovered is it—the first, last, and only individual of E. woodii to be found in the wild. (Incidentally, “It is not known what drove Wood’s cycad to extinction in the wild, or indeed if it ever was abundant,” a Kew Gardens description reads.34) At this point, the species cannot naturally reproduce as it has for hundreds of millions of years. And yet, there are hundreds of E. woodii plants on earth today.

What kind of endling is this???

Unlike rhinos, ibexes, or even snails, Encephalartos woodii—and all cycads—challenges the idea of “an individual.” It’s easy—straightforward—to see how Celia was an endling and her clone was “her” again; when Celia’s clone died, that was that. But cycad plants propagate clones of themselves when they grow offsets and suckers. These clones are genetically identical to their parent plant and can grow to be a new, individual plant, albeit one that is a clone. (For cycads, this is an adaptive strategy if pollination fails.) Thus, there can be several plants that are all clones; because no new traits can evolve in a species that is many clones of a single individual, the species—Wood’s cycad—is effectively in an evolutionary holding pattern, at the whim of humans to continue to propagate and grow the offsets into adult plants.

When Wylie brought back offsets to the Durban Botanical Gardens, the specimens he collected were male—the same male, technically, as the cycad male parent plant from the oNgoye forest. More offsets from this same, original tree were collected until 1916, when the South African Forestry Department collected the last remaining trunk from the clump, sending it to Pretoria, thus making Encephalartos woodii extinct in the wild.35 (There is some dispute in Wood cycad literature about whether there were two or four trunks of the original plant.36) The offsets that Wood and Wylie cultivated remain in the Durban Botanical Gardens to this day; one Durban cycad currently measures upward of two meters (6.5 feet) around the trunk in circumference and weighs more than 2.5 tons.37

Wood sent other offsets to other botanical gardens—like Kew Gardens in London, where the plant stayed in the Palm House for the duration of the twentieth century until its move to the Temperate House.38 (“It’s so lonesome and rare that only one specimen has ever been found in the wild,” the Kew Gardens website describes.39) In addition to the plants at Kew Gardens and Durban Botanical Gardens, Wood’s offsets cycads can be found in Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania, Hortus Botanicus in the Netherlands, and Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town, to name a few places.

So what does all of this mean for Wood’s cycad? Evolutionarily, not much. Since there isn’t a—known—female individual, the plant continues to live through propagation. (Cycads live an incredibly long time; in some species, an individual plant can live to be a thousand years old.) The new plants from offsets grow the species in number. Botanists have bred a Wood’s cycad with a female E. natalensis (a closely related cycad species) in the hope of producing hybrids that they can mate and remate with the original offset, over several plant generations, with a genetically intentional female E. woodii—or something close enough. There is also the small, small hope that one of the plants might spontaneously change sex, thus providing the species with a natural female plant.

Years ago, I visited Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens in Cape Town and walked through the garden’s cycad amphitheater of “living fossils,” where the gardens grow close to forty different cycad species that are endemic to South Africa, including the plant that was sent by James Wood in 1916 from the Durban Botanical Gardens. (“At Kirstenbosch the base of the trunk is obscured by a cage that surrounds [the] plant, put there in the 1980s to prevent suckers from being stolen again,” the website for the South African national Biodiversity Institute informs us.40) When I visited, I understood that many of the cycad species were endangered, but I hadn’t quite grasped that one of them—E. woodii—was a plant that had been cultivated as an offset from the Wood’s cycad endling. It’s a chastening, humbling feeling to realize you hiked by an endling and—due to your own ignorance—didn’t know it.

The Wood’s cycad endling is, literally, legion. It’s one individual, but it is in many places, and each of those places can propagate their own offsets—their own clones—with so much less techno-wizardry and intensive laboratory work than went into Celia’s seven minutes of de-extinction. There are Wood’s cycads around the world in various collections, prized by many private collectors much in the same way they would a painting or rare curio.

Consequently, this is a very different sort of endling story than that of Benjamin, Celia, or even the little snail Turgi—a cycad is not easily anthropomorphized, and even if it were, it doesn’t quite fit how we’ve come to think about other endling stories. Rather than a story that uses a particularly charismatic actor or character, “plants can offer a way to tell stories about collectives, rather than individuals,” literary scholar and former biologist Devin Griffiths explained to me. Griffiths’s own research traces how Charles Darwin wrote about plants and plant narratives. “Exploring plants and plant-based narratives are a way to break down a plant–human divide.”41

Because of its biology and evolutionary history, its endling narrative will be different. It’s not a Last Survivor—not exactly—and it’s not a character in an Aesop fable. Wood’s cycad doesn’t have a nickname or a persona. (Other than being a “lonely” plant.) The pathos that comes with the death of an individual and a species so very near extinction is mitigated a bit because, well, there are other clones of the last plant. The species, however, is now dependent on human care and cultivation for its survival.

Incas the Carolina parakeet, Turgi the tree snail, Wood’s cycad, and myriad other endlings remind us that charisma is, for better or worse, an integral part of how we talk about extinction and how we frame extinction stories.

These endlings, and their stories, might not get as much press coverage and attention as Sudan, Fatu, and Najin—the northern white rhinos—but these other, perhaps less charismatic endlings, are hardly alone in their existence. (The Kew Gardens website, for example, points out that they have other “lonely” and “last” plants in their collections beyond Wood’s cycad; plants like Hyophorbe amaricaulis, a palm tree endemic to the island of Mauritius; Cypripedium calceolus, the British lady’s slipper orchid; and Ramosmania rodriguesii, commonly known as café marron, from the island of Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean. In the instances of the orchid and café marron, the gardens were able to repropagate the plant out of its endling status, although these they are still considered extinct in the wild.42) But they are still endling stories, regardless of whether we consider the endlings charismatic or not; they still show how we humans mark the extinction—or almost extinction—of a species.

Perhaps endlings could be a way of telling stories about species that we don’t typically see as charismatic (invertebrates, plants, the like), functioning as a set of flagship stories for the narratives of species extinctions. After all, we have decided how to imbue and read species’ charisma in the past; what’s to prevent charisma from evolving to encompass other endling stories?

Perhaps charisma’s flexibility could be its greatest storytelling asset.