THE Himalayan snow lotus has been sent down an ever shrinking evolutionary path. And it鈥檚 all down to people picking large flowers for herbal remedies and tourist souvenirs, according to a botanical survey.
Large flowers of Saussurea laniceps are prized as traditional treatments for headache and high blood pressure.
The flowers are picked when they have grown to their maximum size, but before they have the chance to set their seeds.
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To see if harvesting the larger flowers was weeding out the genes for larger plant size, Wayne Law and Jan Salick of Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis compared the heights of flowers in heavily picked areas with those at protected sites, such as the sacred Tibetan mountain of Khawa Karpo.
They found that on average the plants in heavily harvested areas were 40 per cent shorter when they reached maximum size. In contrast, there was no difference in another species of snow lotus whose flowers are seldom collected (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, DOI: 10.1073_pnas.0502931102).
What鈥檚 more, specimens placed in herbarium collections in the 19th and early 20th century are around 45 per cent larger than those found today (see 鈥淚n the blink of an eye鈥�).
