A small group of mahogany trees were found growing along a 200-meter (650-foot) stretch of shoreline on Pemba Island, Zanzibar. Scientists have recently confirmed the tree is a new species, but with fewer than 30 left in the wild, it’s already critically endangered.
“It’s an extraordinary finding that none of us expected,” Silvia Ceppi of Istituto Oikos, a conservation nonprofit working in the area, told Mongabay.
Ceppi said the mahogany trees were hiding in plain sight. The beach along the Tondooni peninsula where they grow is visited by thousands of residents and tourists each year.
The trees, named Afzelia corallina after the ancient fossilized coral beds where they grow, also produce sweet-smelling crimson, white and pink flowers that resemble coral, the botanists write in a paper describing the species.
Mongabay was with the team of researchers in December 2024 when they stumbled upon the first of these flowering trees during a botanical expedition to the 2,000-hectare (nearly 5,000-acre) Ngezi-Vumawimbi Forest Reserve, in the north of Pemba. The team initially thought it could be one of the rare Intsia bijuga trees that grew in the reserve’s nearby patch of coastal forest. But closer examination confirmed it was an Afzelia, or mahogany. Like a number of other mahogany species, the timber is attractive and sought after for furniture, which could explain why there are so few surviving on Pemba, located just 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the Tanzanian mainland.
A follow-up expedition in January found one of the 30 surviving trees was felled by illegal wood cutters, and two others were toppled by storms — showing just how vulnerable the trees are. Worryingly, the team discovered very few seeds; natural regeneration was mostly from shoots that grew from the roots of some parent trees.
The few seeds they did collect, however, were easy to germinate and have a 90% survival rate, said tropical botanist Andrea Bianchi, a member of the research team and co-author of the study describing the tree. He and colleagues will appeal to owners of private lodges just north of the trees’ natural range to consider having A, corralina seedlings planted in their gardens where they’ll be safe from timber poachers.
“Then we could carefully plant seedlings from different mother trees,” to maximize genetic variability, he says.
Ngezi-Vumawimbi Forest Reserve is home to nearly 500 different plant species, including at least four that are new to science, but it remains under threat from illegal wood poaching and the construction of a planned eco-resort, which, when built, will cover much of the reserve’s intact coastal forest.
Istituto Oikos recently applied for emergency funding to combat a spike in commercial timber poaching in Ngezi. They also plan to sift through leaf litter beneath the surviving mahogany trees to find any additional seeds that could be raised in a plant nursery.
“It’s a last-minute situation, because there are only 27 [mahogany] trees [left],” Ceppi said.
Banner image: Scientists examine the new mahogany tree on Pemba Island, Zanzibar, in December 2024. Image by Ryan Truscott.
