More than 200 years ago, the Scottish botanist William Roxburgh published Hortus Bengalensis, a thick book cataloging hundreds of medicinal plants collected at the East India Company’s botanical gardens in Calcutta.
200多年前，苏格兰植物学家William Roxburgh出版了Hortus bengalensis，这是一本厚厚的书，对东印度公司在加尔各答植物园收集的数百种药用植物进行了编目。
Among the hundreds of plants appearing in the book’s pages was an orchid originally collected in the Chittagong region of what is now Bangladesh.
在这本书中出现的数百种植物中，有一种兰花最初是在现在孟加拉国的吉大港地区采集的。
Identified at the time as Cymbidium alatum, the orchid now goes by the taxonomic name Theocostele alata.
兰花在当时被鉴定为兰花，现在被命名为Theosterele alata。
You can’t find the species in Bangladesh anymore, though.
不过，你在孟加拉国再也找不到这种物种了。
No one has officially observed Theocostele alata there since Roxburgh made note of it in 1814.
自从Roxburgh在1814年记录下来以来，没有人在那里正式观察过Theosterele alata。
And it’s not alone.
而且它并不孤单。
According to research published this month in the International Journal of Ecology and Environmental Sciences, Theocostele alata is one of 32 orchid species native to Bangladesh that no longer appear within its borders.
根据本月发表在“国际生态与环境科学杂志”(International Journal Of Ecology And Environmental Sciences)上的一项研究，西奥斯特勒·阿拉塔(Theosterele Alata)是孟加拉国本土的32种兰花之一，这些兰花不再出现在孟加拉国境内。
That represents the extinction of 17% of Bangladesh’s 187 known orchid diversity.
这代表了孟加拉国187种已知兰花多样性中的17%灭绝。
Researchers call the loss “alarming” due to the flowers’ ecological uniqueness and their potential medicinal, horticultural and ornamental values.
研究人员称，由于这种花的生态独特性及其潜在的药用、园艺和观赏价值，这一损失“令人震惊”。
“If this rate continues, there will be no trace of orchids in the near future,” says Mohammed Kamrul Huda, a professor of botany at the University of Chittagong and lead author of the study.
吉大港大学植物学教授穆罕默德·卡姆鲁尔·胡达(Mohammed Kamrul Huda)说：“如果这种速度继续下去，不久的将来就不会有兰花的踪迹了。”他也是这项研究的主要作者。
Huda and his colleagues spent nearly a quarter of a century, from 1996 to 2019, conducing field research throughout Bangladesh to catalog the country’s existing orchids and look for previously described species.
从1996年到2019年，胡达和他的同事花了近四分之一个世纪的时间，在孟加拉国各地进行实地研究，对该国现有的兰花进行分类，并寻找之前描述的物种。
They even searched herbariums and private collections for species they couldn’t find in the wild, to no avail.
他们甚至在草本馆和私人收藏品中寻找他们在野外找不到的物种，但没有任何用处。
The paper blames habitat destruction for most of the disappearances, although it’s hard to determine exactly when these orchids went extinct in Bangladesh.
该论文将大部分失踪事件归咎于栖息地的破坏，尽管很难确定这些兰花在孟加拉国灭绝的确切时间。
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