Save rare plants from the table, please!
ON WEDNESDAY, an online food livestreamer named Outdoor Eater posted a video clip online, in which he pulled a snow lotus out of the ground in Tibet and boiled it with his noodles. The damage done to the local environment is more than he could imagine. China Daily writer Zhang Zhouxiang comments:
Outdoor Eater might not know what he dug up is not an ordinary snow lotus, but an extremely rare species Saussurea medusa, more commonly called "Medusa snow rabbit".
The exact number existing in the wild is unknown, but scientists believe that the species is on the brink of extinction and domestic law has forbidden people from collecting them for private use since 2000. To quote Gu Yourong, a botanical scholar from Capital Normal University, "even botanical scientists refrain from collecting it for scientific use".
