''Sartidia perrieri'' is a grass species endemic to Madagascar, known from only one collected individual and now considered extinct.

Henri Perrier de la Bâthie Henri is an Estonian, Finnish, French, German and Luxembourgish form of the masculine given name Henry. People with this given name ; French noblemen :'' See the 'List of rulers named Henry' for Kings of France named Henri.'' * Henri I de Montm ...

, in 1914, collected a plant in the central region of Madagascar, near

Antsirabe Antsirabe () is the third largest city in Madagascar and the capital of the Vakinankaratra region, with a population of 265,018 in 2014. In Madagascar, Antsirabe is known for its relatively cool climate (like the rest of the central region), it ...

, at an elevation of , where it grew on sandstone rocks in tapia woodland. He wrote in the description of the dried herbarium specimen that he only ever saw one individual of this species, suggesting it was already very rare at that time. Aimée Antoinette Camus named it after its collector and described it as new species in the genus '' Aristida''; Pierre Bourreil later transferred it to '' Sartidia''. ''Sartidia perrieri'' is a tuft-forming grass. The known individual is roughly high, with long leaf blades. Inflorescence is a dense, long

panicle A panicle is a much-branched inflorescence. (softcover ). Some authors distinguish it from a compound spike inflorescence, by requiring that the flowers (and fruit) be pedicellate (having a single stem per flower). The branches of a panicle are of ...

and the species has long awns extending from the

lemma Lemma may refer to: Language and linguistics * Lemma (morphology), the canonical, dictionary or citation form of a word * Lemma (psycholinguistics), a mental abstraction of a word about to be uttered Science and mathematics * Lemma (botany), a ...

s in the spikelets. With its clusters of large spikelets, it is very different from the only other known ''Sartidia'' species from Madagascar, '' S. isaloensis. In 2014, biologists were able to sequence

chloroplast A chloroplast () is a type of membrane-bound organelle known as a plastid that conducts photosynthesis mostly in plant and algal cells. The photosynthetic pigment chlorophyll captures the energy from sunlight, converts it, and stores it in ...

and nuclear DNA from the 100-year-old type specimen and confirmed its placement in ''Sartidia'' with molecular phylogenetics. It was closer to Southern African species than to ''S. isaloensis'', suggesting the two species descend from lineages that colonised Madagascar independently. No other individual of ''Sartidia perrieri'' has been found since the original collection, and the species was accordingly assessed as

extinct in the wild A species that is extinct in the wild (EW) is one that has been categorized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as known only by living members kept in captivity or as a naturalized population outside its historic range due ...

. It was suggested that pressure from grazing and agricultural expansion was already high at the time when Perrier de la Bâthie collected the plant. Wooded savannas may have been replaced by open, C grass-dominated grasslands, leading to the loss of habitats suitable to C grasses like ''S. perrieri''.

References

{{Authority control Aristidoideae Extinct plants Endemic flora of Madagascar Taxa named by Aimée Antoinette Camus