Dear botanists, there’s something that I’ve been wondering about recently. It’s the following:
The (rare) tree species Phylica Arborea is only found on Amsterdam Island and Gough Island. What I found intruiging about this; how did the same kind of tree end up solely on those two very remote and isolated islands? They are 5000 miles apart. I haven’t been able to find any kind of information on this.
Maybe the explanation is really simple, but I as a layman in botany/biology haven’t been able to get my head around it.
The only thing I can offer are a couple of hypotheses:
1. Like F4T32008 said, the two islands were once one, and the plant existed on them before they separated. As that particular plant is a dicotyledon, it might be anywhere to 100 million years old, so this is possible(I’m not so hot in geology, but it sounds about possible..)
2. The seeds of the plant were taken from one island to the other, most probably by birds. It is not uncommon for some birds to travel 5000 miles…
