On October 10, Hurricane Michael spun Category 4 winds around the upper reaches of the Sunshine State. With sustained winds of 155 miles per hour, the tempest was the strongest to ever hit the Florida Panhandle—and the fourth worst to make landfall in the lower United States. Almost every structure at Tyndall Air Force base suffered structural damage. The seaside town of Apalachicola, 54 miles down the coast, saw an 8-foot storm surge. And Mexico Beach, which sits halfway between the two, saw three-quarters of its homes, municipal buildings, and businesses damaged. But one structure withstood the storm, despite its front step sitting only 150 yards from the wet and windy Gulf of Mexico. Christened the “Sand Palace” by its owners, the blocky beach home survived not by luck or magic, but good design, says Lance Watson, vice president of Southeastern Consulting Engineers and lead engineer on the project. Here’s how—with money and expertise—the crew outmaneuvered Michael, and made this home a model of resilient architecture.

Open Plan

Deep Dig

Cement Sandwich

Stand Alone

Unbroken Glass

Hangs Out

Top Side

Strong Ties

A Village

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In 1859, Charles Darwin finally published his long-gestating theory of natural selection in On the Origin of Species. Famous for his descriptions of Galapagos turtles and birds’ ever-changing beaks, the English scientist concluded, “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Fast forward almost 160 years, and that quote is serving as the inspiration for a new project to digitize intriguing and, in many cases, endangered plants. Called “Endless Forms,” the initiative brings together 17 research institutions in an effort to scan and share two million plant specimens over the next three years.

Matthew Pace, an orchid expert with the New York Botanical Garden, is one of the project coordinators. He says the digitization will focus on plants from 15 families, including succulents, carnivorous creatures, and epiphytes, which are organisms that grow on other plants. Though they differ remarkably from their living appearances, these botanical specimens find new ways to beguile the eye, even when packed tight and turned into 2D images.

More importantly, these images are one of the few assurances future generations of scientists can see and study what came before, as many of the featured plants are threatened by poaching, climate change, and other modern perils. That’s why no plant stands alone. Each one is photographed adjacent to a ruler for size, color target to ensure the exact right balance and exposure of the image, and a card detailing its provenance.

Here, from what seems like an endless selection of stills, are eight especially noteworthy forms:

Sedum botterii

“There’s still a lot we don’t know about plant body plans, and why plants look the way they do,” Pace says. “Even with something as iconic as the venus flytrap, we’re still trying to grapple with these basic questions.” S. botterii might help. The succulent epiphyte, found on tree branches and cliff sides, is thought to be one of the most primitive members of its genus, according to the California Academy of Sciences.

Agave parryi huachucensis

If you’re a true fan of agaves, you’ll know the name Howard Scott Gentry. An American botanist born in 1903, Gentry is famous (at least in certain circles) for his work documenting plant life in Mexico starting in the 1930s. This specimen, commonly called Parry’s agave or artichoke century plant, is one item in a “massive trove” of flora collected by Gentry, according to curators at UT Austin. In addition to the physical collections of broad leaves and little buds, Gentry also took photographs like the one seen here, and wrote down ethnobotanical observations about the relationship between people and the plants around them.

Echites umbellatus

Also called the “devil’s potato root,” E. umbellatus is a twining vine indigenous to the Caribbean. The Philadelphia Academy of Sciences has been using this and other specimens to research the evolution of plant chemistry. Some 200 years ago, members of this species showed signs of pyrrolizidine alkaloid toxins, which are still being researched in this and other contexts today. With careful preservation and digitization, scientists may be able to ask and answer similar questions in another two centuries.

Yucca linearifolia

First described in 1995 by Texas botanist Karen Clary, Y linearifolia has had a troubling two decades. Since this initial description, the plant, which grows only in small zones of Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert, has been sought-after by illegal harvesters. “There’s a chance they could be used to facilitate poaching, so there’s a need for the community to define guidelines around this,” Pace says of the Endless Forms project. “When you’re dealing with really rare plants, that increases their wow factor. For someone to say, I’m the only person in the world who has this extremely rare plant in my collection, that’s a huge status symbol.”

Tillandsia usneoides

This uniquely charismatic epiphyte is known in the United States as “Spanish moss.” It hangs from Southern live oaks and drapes over streetlights from Virginia to Florida and as far west as Texas. But it’s not moss, and it isn’t Spanish. Rather, it’s a globe-trotting perennial herb found in many a tropical climate; in French Polynesia, half a world away, it’s known as “grandpa’s beard.” Historically, it was more than mere decoration. According to this specimen’s keepers at the University of Wisconsin, the spindly stuff was used to fill car seats and mattresses, and even insulated homes.

Puya cryptantha

Members of the Bromeliaceae family are easily identified by their spiky flowers. It may be hard to tell from this image, but the specimen seen here is a cousin of the pineapple. While we associate the golden fruit with Hawaii, P. cryptantha is thought to have emerged in the Andes mountain range. Such “alpine environments are among of the most imperiled regions on the planet,” according to botanists at Harvard University.

Sarracenia purpurea

Perhaps the coolest part of S. purpurea is hidden deep inside: the carnivorous plant is lined with downward-pointing water-resistant hairs. When a tasty bug dips inside its flowery gullet, the insect is trapped and drowned in collected rainwater. The pitcher plant’s outsides are OK, too. Named for the Greek word “purpurea,” meaning purple-red, the sightly stems attract poachers, who sell uprooted individuals on the black market. Many states have conservation laws to protect it. Scientists with the “Endless Forms” project have elected to blur information on the origin of certain digitized specimens for similar reasons, hoping to safeguard other plants like it in the same area.

Consolea rubescens

Known by the common name “Road Kill Cactus,” this nearly-spineless plant is found throughout the Caribbean and north into Florida, where it can grow up to 20 feet tall. Its name comes not from actual altercations with cars, but because its broad stems look squashed—like they’ve been recently run over. Populations of C. rubescens are currently stable, but the prickly plants could face a challenge down the road: “There’s some concern that plants that are extremely adapted to extreme environments—like cactus family, the poinsettia family—can be disrupted by changing circumstances,” Pace says.

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Note: This story was published in June 2018, when Instagram introduced IGTV. We are promoting it again in late December 2018, given the outcry about the app’s latest update, which got rid of vertical scrolling through the feed, replacing it with a tap-through, not unlike the Instagram Stories interface. According to a tweet by the head of Instagram), the update was supposed to be a very small test. By now, users should be experiencing Instagram as they did before.

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom has reportedly said the photo-sharing app’s motto is “do one thing and do it well.” For a time, that ethos was clear, and a generation of users came to rely on Instagram as one of the most serene places on your home screen—a self-curated chronological scrapbook with vacation pics, fashion shots, and unlimited foodie content. Where other apps were pushy, busy, and bright, Instagram’s focus didn’t seem to be on engagement; it seemed to be on the edit.

But that’s all changed. In 2018, Instagram is less pastoral playground and more Frankensteined fun house, chock-a-block with features. Instead of doing one thing (photo-sharing), it’s increasingly trying to do everything. In 2013, it released a direct messaging function, which dramatically expanded in 2015. That same year, Instagram ditched its signature square crop in equanimous favor of all photo types. In late 2016, it added Stories, a Snapchat-like service that allows vertical images and videos to be uploaded on a timer, disappearing after 24 hours. That same year, it disrupted the much-loved reverse-chronological flow of the feed, shifting to an algorithm that seems to many users to sort content almost at random. Last week, the company unveiled IGTV, which allows users to post longer videos—up to 1 hour in length—to the IGTV service in the app, or to a standalone IGTV app, which many see as a challenge to YouTube’s reign. And as this story was in its draft phase, the app debuted a new new feature—private video chat.

None of this has gone unnoticed, especially among those earlier adopters, who can trace along their own profile the platform’s growth from a few million users making bright orange sea of Kelvin-ed beach shots rimmed in black matte frames to 1 billion users producing historically unprecedented volumes of, well, contemporary art. The technical quality of the content has risen, but for those with a long memory, it seems that somewhere along the way Instagram lost what made it special.

Some blame the introduction of stories (Buzzfeed memorably called the service a “home-wrecker”). Others point their finger at an increased ad load. And still others rage at the death of the reverse-chronological newsfeed. But despite these widely-agreed-upon woes, Instagram appears to be doing better than ever. What gives?

Perhaps the most intriguing explanation for the gap between Instagram’s likability and its usability can be tied to a uniquely 21st century truth: user experience, or UX, designers know us better than we know ourselves.

Nate Bolt is the founder of Ethnio, a user experience research recruiting platform. Before that, he managed UX researchers at Facebook and Instagram. He says Instagram’s success in heavily-criticized services sounds counterintuitive because it is. “Sometimes you build stuff that people love in terms of their behavior, and talk [bad] about constantly,” Bolt says. “It is the most bizarre thing.” In other words, while some claim Instagram’s every step is a misstep, most users continue to like, swipe, and upload. In fact, many appear to be using the app more.

“Self-reported feedback is notoriously hard to rely on,” Bolt says. “Even public sentiment is hard to rely on, when something’s new.” For example, research suggests self-reports are systematically skewed, whether the report is made to your doctor about your health behaviors, or to a media researcher about your time spent playing games. These inconsistencies have many sources, from memories that go fuzzy over time to the seemingly innate human desire to provide socially-acceptable answers to the fact that shifts in emotional states can alter our perception of time.

Public sentiment, meanwhile, is important to the long-term success of any business, but that has to be balanced with the fact that consumers are notoriously averse to change. Remember when Google changed its logo in 2015 from a serif font, which it had used for decades, to a sans serif font? Barely. But at the time, three years and a few trillion Google searches ago, the internet had a complete and utter meltdown over a few curlicues.

User experience researchers are aware of these difficulties, so they bypass knee-jerk reactions in favor of cold, hard behavioral data. Quantitative and qualitative measures, adapted from psychology, medical research, and other scientific domains, help companies like Instagram track success. Surveys and focus groups are still employed, but observational methods are often preferred. Fortunately, high-tech tools make capturing this information easier than ever.

With screen-sharing, UX researchers can watch users navigate a digital product and swiftly identify bottlenecks and surprising uses. And at Bolt’s company, Ethnio, a request pops up on a user’s screen in real time, asking them to participate in a discussion of the service with a trained researcher. By identifying people when they’re in the middle of using a product, the company can gather more critical, real-time feedback from a diverse sets of users. As a result, companies have a better sense of how customers interact with their products than ever before.

Of course, UX design doesn’t exist in a bubble—it’s shaped by the demands of current users, as well as the company’s hopes and dreams for who future users might be.

For that reason, Instagram’s transformation from meditative space to multimedia sandbox could easily be blamed on teens. Increasingly, the app just isn’t designed for those early adopters who fondly recall a quieter time online, but for young people who, after all, are the future. Facebook has essentially bottomed out in that department—in 2015, 71 percent of teens told Pew they used Facebook, compared to just 51 percent three years later. But 72 percent of teens report using Instagram, according to a Pew Research Center report published in May. That means the app is second only in all of social media to YouTube, the horizontal video service used by a whopping 85 percent of teens. Instagram’s brighter, buzzier design and investment in the eerily-YouTube-like IGTV service may be attempts to gain—and, more critically, maintain—such widespread appeal among Gen Z.

Alternatively, Instagram’s aggressive roll-outs could represent a larger shift in focus. Systrom, the company’s co-founder, has long opined about his desires to create something different from other social media apps. There’s that “one thing” motto—and his uncharacteristically dogged efforts to automate deletion of harmful comments. But just because Systrom continues to run Instagram doesn’t mean Facebook’s influence on the app can be discounted. Facebook’s business-minded goals of monetizing our attention, connecting people across multiple Facebook-owned platforms, and using machines to automate processes and even predict behaviors have all reshaped the photo-sharing app. As the stories tool, which offers augmented reality face filters, but few real editing tools compared to the main feed, clearly illustrates, Instagram’s priorities are shifting away from the edit, and into engagement.

For better or worse, pulsating pink orbs; infinite scroll; notifications in pink, orange, and blue; and other clamorous designs do drive engagement. Stories on all of Facebook’s platforms from Instagram to WhatsApp are growing 15 times faster than corresponding newsfeeds. Instagram gained more than 200 million monthly users since September 2017. And the algorithmic feed, while still detested two years after it was introduced, generates more engagement than the reverse-chronological feed did, according to the company. It’s long been said that actions speak louder than words. On Instagram and other data-driven apps, that’s finally true.

As for IGTV, it’s too soon to say what will happen. But the same researchers and designers that gave us every other skepticism-inducing feature in the Instagram suite are confident that vertical longform video is the way to go. While taking on YouTube may seem impossible right now, the odds are good that wherever Instagram leads, our fingers will eventually follow.

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Finding a clearwing butterfly isn’t difficult, says Marianne Elias, so long as you’re 6,000 feet up in the mountains of Ecuador. There, in the densely-foliated tropics, several species of transparent Lepidoptera live a seemingly tranquil life of beauty. But the paradisal scene is dependent on a bitter secret lurking in the critter’s window-like wings.

“Those butterflies are toxic butterflies,” says Elias, an expert in biodiversity at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Instead of the colorful hairs that make up typical wings, these see-through gliders are full of alkaloids, which lend them an astringent taste. Knowing the acrid meal that awaits them, predators, whether other insects, birds, or even monkeys, are unlikely to take a bite.

Elias captured this particular image on a trip to South America’s western coast, where she and several other scientists studied the butterflies in their natural habitat. Their research, which looks at the evolution and ecological niche of several related species, was published in the journal Functional Ecology in February. Friday, Elias’s photo of the well-named Hypomenitis enigma was named the first place winner of the BMC Ecology Image Competition.

Its transparency comes from the shape of its wing scales, which work like anti-reflectors, allowing more light to travel through the wing. Snapping this shot was no big deal, Elias tells me over the phone. The species “is pretty abundant, so it’s actually quite easy to see flying around.” Unraveling the biological mystery inside the picture has proven more challenging.

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Evolutionary theory would suggest that all clearwing butterfly species would develop similar coloring so predators could “learn to associate the bad taste with a given color pattern,” Elias says. But in reality, each group has very distinct markings—some have brown frames, others black and white, still others orange or red.

Upon careful observation, the researchers developed a hypothesis. “There is ecological segregation of the butterfly species, so some fly in the canopy, others in the understory, others in the more open area,” Elias says. “If predators in those micro-habitats are different, then a diversity of color patterns could be maintained.” Experimental models are needed to confirm this concept, but it builds on previous research of highly-specialized ecological niches across the animal kingdom.

Equally confounding is the butterfly’s mix-and-match construction. “Usually, toxic species have very bright, conspicuous color patterns,” Elias says. Dart frogs, which secrete a toxin through their skin, are entirely covered in police-tape yellow or stop-sign red. Transparent animals, meanwhile, typically go all in on their disappearing act. The butterflies seen here are doing both, like an invisibility cloak whose trim didn’t quite get the memo.

But Elias’s team developed a hypothesis for this, too. “We think those species are making the best of both worlds,” she says. “By being less detectable, they’re less likely to be found by a predator. But by offering this coloring pattern, they’re able to communicate they are toxic.”

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Perhaps the greatest pleasure in science is naming a new species. You can name animals after your loved ones (or, let’s be honest, yourself), insects after their own weird genitals, and lichens after Lady Gaga. When you’ve made such a discovery, the world is truly your Crassostrea virginica oyster (itself named for the colony of Virginia, which was in turn most likely named for Elizabeth I of England, the virgin queen).

The latest spelunkers in the depths of creative nomenclature are spider biologist Carlos Perafan, Fernando Perez-Miles, and William Galvis. While working in the Andes mountains, the trio discovered six species of bald-legged spiders that had never previously been seen in Colombia. According to a new study, published Thursday in the journal ZooKeys, four of the spiders had no clear genus, so the researchers invented their own. Inspired by the reportedly clone-like similarities between the members of this new group, they christened the arachnids Stormtropis, for the white-clad soldiers in Star Wars.

RELATED: This butterfly’s wings are transparently toxic

These new critters are part of the intraorder Mygalomorphae, which includes the beefier eight-legged species such as tarantulas and trapdoor spiders. Like their peers, Stormtropis display “cryptic habits,” according to their discoverers. This not only means they’re mysterious (they certainly are), but that they literally cloak themselves in soils—a camouflaging phenomenon known as crypsis.

One of the most interesting facets of the wee stormtroopers’ anatomy is the way their cuticles (spiders’ skin-like exoskeletons) adhere to dirt particles, enabling them to blend in with their environment. They also have a “controversial phylogenetic position,” meaning scientists still aren’t sure where to place them in the tree of life. But subsequent discoveries like these are sure to dig up some new information on these dirt-dwelling crawlers. After all, several of these specimens are holotypes—the preserved physical example against which scientists will judge all other members of their species for centuries to come.

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Last week was chock-full of frog news, both heart-warming and heart-breaking. Here are the top four photo-worthy events:

See Sehuencas water frogs in love

Romeo (pictured above in all his orange tummy glory), was thought to be the last Sehuencas water frog in existence. Ever since biologists scooped him out of the wilds of Bolivia, he’s been the most eligible frog bachelor in the world. Most recently, the Global Wildlife Conservation group created a Match dot com dating profile in order to find Romeo his better half—by sending an expedition to South America. The search worked: biologists identified two males and three females of the same species in Bolivian cloud forests, densely-wooded regions perpetually enshrouded in canopy-level silvagenitus clouds. On Monday, the conservation group announced that Romeo had successfully bonded with a mate, aptly named Juliet. The two lovers can be seen below.

Lonely Romeo had stopped making mating calls altogether in 2017. But according to a press release, he began ribbeting again in March, after Juliet moved into his aquarium. The duo have so far struggled with mating, however. Romeo hasn’t assumed the right position for amplexus—the frog mating ritual where females lay eggs as the males fertilize them from behind—often enough or long enough (some male frogs can keep the shape for “week or even months,” according to a press release). But his caretakers remain hopeful.

Meet the new genus, Mini

Herpetologist Mark Scherz and his colleagues recently published a study in PLOS ONE announcing they’d identified five new miniature frog species in Madagascar. Three are named “Mini mum, Mini scule, and Mini ature, because I am HILARIOUS,” Scherz tweeted. He’s serious: the frog seen above, perched on a fingernail, is a real, live Mini mum. The new species have been described as “staple-sized” and “astronomically-small”. Going forward, the researchers hope to better understand how the frogs, which span three genera, evolved to be so teeny.

… And an invasive frog-killing fungus

The Helena’s marsupial frog, seen above, is a member of the Hemiphractidae family, which live in Central and South America. These photogenic amphibians are threatened by a deadly fungus, chytridiomycosis, or simply chytrid. The fungus is the most invasive species in the world, according to a new report in the journal Science. It has negatively affected a whopping 501 amphibious species. When chytrid creeps across the porous skin of a frog, toad, or salamander, it impedes electrolyte transport, and ultimately triggers a fatal heart attack.

Watch pumpkin toads fluoresce

Despite its cute common name, the pumpkin toadlet is actually a very poisonous frog. Its bright colors are a warning sign—a biological phenomenon called aposematism. But it turns out the frogs, native to the Atlantic forest along the coast of Brazil, have been keeping their niftiest feature to themselves. When Sandra Goutte, a postdoctoral associate at NYU Abu Dhabi, and her colleagues “discovered that Brachycephalus ephippium could not hear its own mating calls, they searched for alternative visual signals the frogs could use to communicate instead,” according to a press release. They shined a UV light on the hoppers, and were surprised to find their backs glowed. Turns out, the pumpkin toadlet’s skeleton is unusually fluorescent, according to the new research published Friday in the journal Scientific Reports. Because their skin is so thin, the UV lamp actually hit the bones of the two specimens under analysis, triggering that eerie gleam.

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Like cotton candy, glass is an amorphous solid. Both the carnival snack and the accompanying Mexican Coke bottle begin as molten liquid, but cool so rapidly that their molecular building blocks don’t have time to settle into an orderly pattern, also known as a crystalline structure. Chemically, the result is an unusual state, somewhere between a solid and liquid. Culturally, the result is thousands of years of folklore and fantasy.

Where cotton candy is artificial and almost entirely made of sugar, the most common kind of glass is formed from sand. These so-called silicate glasses constitute the cups we drink from, and the window panes we gaze through. But there are many other types of glass, all forged in fire. Uranium glass, which gets its viridescent tint from an oxidized form of uranium, was popular in late 19th and early 20th century home goods. Trinitite comes from the one-time detonation of a plutonium nuclear bomb at the Trinity test site in New Mexico in 1945; it melted local quartz and feldspar on impact, imparting a faint sea green hue. And Gorilla Glass, which chemists bathe in molten salts to forcibly strengthen its chemical structure, can withstand 15 drops, making it perfect for a cellphone surface.

But perhaps the most enigmatic of the glasses is obsidian, a naturally-occurring volcanic glass—and the inspiration for the all-powerful dragonglass in Game of Thrones.

Obsidian forms as lava, spewed from a volcano, and quickly cooled at surface temperatures. It’s found all over the planet, from Yellowstone National Park’s Obsidian Cliff to Italy’s Aeolian Islands, typically in sizable, concentrated deposits. Unpolished, the igneous rock can look dusty gray or brown. But polished, it becomes pitch black and shiny—sometimes so shiny, you can sometimes see your own reflection.

For thousands of years, humans have been turning the midnight glass into weaponry. Its lattice-free insides may be unpredictable, but obsidian breaks in a very reliable “conchoidal fracture” pattern. This sharp, curved fragmentation makes it popular for arrowheads, which get their bite not just from the central point, but the small, teeth-like ridges along the blade. (Game of Thrones seems to consider dragonglass best suited for arrowheads, too.) This defensive application, along with obsidian’s everyday use as a cutting tool, made the volcanic glass highly sought-after. Earlier this year, a paper proposed the existence of an ancient Ice Road, along which humans traded obsidian into the Arctic.

RELATED: The winning images from the Smithsonian Photo Contest celebrate the beauty of our natural world

There were other uses of obsidian, too. Mesoamericans made a unique weapon called the “macuahuitl.” A wooden paddle studded with obsidian blades, it looked like an elongated mace, and surely inspired as much terror. Artisans have used it to make jet black jewelry for at least 10,000 years. And humans have assigned the stone various magical, spiritual, and healing properties throughout history. Apache tears, for example, is a name for rounded obsidian pebbles that are said to have formed from the tears of Native American women mourning Apache warriors killed by the U.S. Calvary. Today, those little rocks are used as meditation stones. Thin volcanic glass fibers called Pele’s hair, meanwhile, are named for the volcanic goddess who created the Hawaiian Islands. It’s too fragile and sharp to be handled, but remains a potent reminder of the origins of the Polynesian archipelago.

In Game of Thrones, dragonglass isn’t formed from the searing heat of a volcano, but, as its name suggests, from the fire sprayed from a dragon’s belly. As the series comes to an end after eight long seasons, there’s a lot of pressure on the shimmery substance to perform: Dragonglass, along with Valyrian steel, is the only material known to kill white walkers, the menacing undead enemy. Hopefully this amorphous solid—and the stories carved from it—can hold up.

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For thousands of years, botany has been firmly rooted in the earth—much like the plants under study. But more recently, the scientific discipline has lifted off.

Last week, researchers at the National Tropical Botanical Garden on the island Kaua’i announced they’d discovered a few thriving members of Hibiscadelphus woodii, officially (and now it seems mistakenly) declared extinct in 2016. The plants—which grow in Kalalau Valley, by all accounts Hawaii’s equivalent of the Cliffs of Insanity—were found not by foot, but by drone.

The flower, seen above before its brilliant yellow flowers go wine-darken with age, was formally discovered in 1991 by Ken Wood, a conservation biologist who specializes in the plant life of the Pacific islands. He named it Hibiscadelphus woodii, or Wood’s hau kuahiwi, Hawaiian for “snow mountain.” The species has long been plagued by habitat loss; human disturbance, invasive species, and diseases threaten plants and animals on island archipelagos around the world. This is particularly troubling, because these species often occur only in one place—the place they are no longer safe—and nowhere else on Earth. Given this particular flower was last seen in 2009, scientists had the sunny relative of the hibiscus listed as extinct in 2016.

But as new drone footage reveals, the species wasn’t dead, it was just hiding.

In 2016, the same year the plant was listed extinct, the National Tropical Botanical Garden teamed up with drone operator Ben Nyberg to supplement the work of intrepid scientists like Wood, who rappel down cliffs and trudge through rainforests to conserve plants. In January, National Geographic reports, Nyberg saw what looked like a Hibiscadelphus woodii plant while surveying via drone. (His strategy, the magazine added, combines a methodical “grid system” analysis with “intuition.”) The following month, Nyberg and Wood hiked 700 feet into the valley, according to Quartz. Unable to go further, they flew a drone 800 feet deeper into the ravine. The image the drone transmitted back to their portable monitor confirmed their hopes: living Hibiscadelphus woodii plants.

This isn’t the first time a species considered extinct has been found again after a long and troubling absence. This year, as Nyberg was flying his drone into the Hawaiian tropics, researchers on Indonesia’s North Moluccas island found the world’s largest bee species, Megachile pluto, hiding in plain sight. Biologists also found a female Chelonoidis phantasticus, a species of giant tortoise presumed extinct for a century, hiding in the underbrush. And still other researchers scooped up some potential mates for Romeo, recently thought to be the last Sehuencas water frog alive. While these finds are legitimately joyous, three golden Hibiscadelphus woodii can only do so much to illuminate an increasingly dark and depleted natural world.

But, just like a botanist’s drone, hope tends to take flight.

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