Nepenthes robcantleyi - yet another species nova

The past 2-3 years have seen a surge in discoveries of new Nepenthes species in this region, particularly in the highlands of Phillippines, which is turning out to be a bubbling hot spot. Examples include N. gantungensis, N. hamiguitanensis, N. leonardoi and N. palawanensis and N. attenboroughii previously mentioned here.

The newest addition to the list is Nepenthes robcantleyi , which incidentally was known in the trade for some time and in fact was already rather famous prior to its formal describtion, being featured in horticulture shows like that in Chelsea and Singapore - albeit as "Black truncata".

2 forms were on display during the recent show here, a red form ....

...... and a darker form, which was how the name "Black truncata" came about.

It was previously believed to be a highland form of the N. truncata (shown below), differing in the wider peristome (the wings at the rim of the pitchers). However, the paper also stated several differences .... if you are keen take a look at François 's interesting entry.

This new species was confined to a mountain in Mindanao, and is feared extinct in the wild as its habitat had been destroyed - such a scenario is so prevalent its a cliche to mention it nowadays.

Its closest relative is Nepenthes veitchii shown below, a more wide-ranging species from Borneo, although the pitchers are much smaller. Too close if you ask me.

Ref: Nepenthes robcantleyi sp. nov. (Nepenthaceae) from Mindanao, Philippines, Nordic J. Bot. 29: 2 (1-5; fig.). 2011

A walk through WOC 2011

With dark clouds looming overhead, the iconic venue for the World Orchid Conference looked rather menacing as we made quick strides towards it. Not a moment too soon, rain started pelting us as we reached the lobby ....

a few days ago, the hallway to the entrance was deserted ….
today, not so ....

We were first greeted by the award winning display from Papua New Guinea ..... the Sepik mask had a crocodile tongue, beside it was another mask with a flying fox looking like a vodoo doll .... ahem excuse me is any for sale ?
Another one from PNG, with a birds-of paradies and another intricate mask with bird motiff....
.... crowds jostled to take photos, inevitably leading to some not-so-nice exchanges beside me .... time to move on.....

Indonesia's display, modelled after a Tana Toraja cliff burial site ....
...this one from Australian Orchid Council ....
Sabah's display - a ferret-badger with Liparis, Malaxis and other ground orchids. I actually liked this quite a bit as it showcased many obscure local species.
Paphs are omni-present in shows like this, this is the ever popular P. spicerianum that sadly will not do well in lowland tropics .....
and here's hybrid from the Dark Side .....
at the floral window section, this one caught my eye with backdrop of variegated leaves (Pandanus ?) and its apparent new hybrid fern .....
alas....they were stapled together.
.... another floral window.
Yes its an orchid show but it did not stop Borneo Exotics from putting a fine display of Nepenthes that almost stole the limelight. Some would say they did ....
I would have dwelled a little more at the displays but crowds were gathering. The frequency of unwelcomed human torsos inserting between the lens and the exhibits rose with every release of the shuttle.

Eventually I retreated to the vendor section for some retail therapy ....

World Orchid Conference 2011 - Singapore

After more than 4 decades, the World Orchid Conference is back in Singapore once more. The round-robin show had been held every 3 years since 1954 and the last time Singapore hosted this event was in October 1963. What's more, this time we get a sneak preview of the Garden-by-the-bay, a project which will costs a few hundred million S$ upon completion. As usual, Government booths will be set up to hand out export certificates on-the-spot if you so wish to bring plants out of the island.

So despite the fact that the venue is connected to the glitzy gambling den, I went ahead and ordered tickets for it.

And if you had yet to plan your vacations, do come - but visit the show first before hopping to the casino , I bet you will find it more enjoyable that way ....

When : 13 – 20 November 2011
Where: Sands Expo and Convention Centre

20th WOC

Life as we know it....

Migrating grebes and ducks foraging in early light ..... my etched impression of Mono Lake in Autumn.

With the surreal spires of tufa, great pool of still water and encircling misty mountains, I thought that if someone were to find an alien life form on earth, a Loch New Monster or something, it would be in a place like this.

Less than 2 months later, NASA published finding a bacteria in that lake that not only utilise Arsenic for energy but use this to replace Phosphorous in their cell structures...in DNA, cell membrane etc. Now both P and As are in the same column in the periodic table which essentially means chemically they are rather similar. However, biochemically, Arsenic, as we know from our Science if not from murder books, blocks the Krebs cycle, the ubiquitous path to energy production in aerobes, which eventually leads to cell death. Even anaerobes dispel this element from the body after utilisation. So to have it as part the of cell structure is unthinkable.

Granted, an image of a bacterium does not inspire as much awe as a Nessie but the scale of the discovery is such that basic science book will be rewritten and life as we know it is no longer limited to what it used to be.

Well, I was just glad I did not heed a guide book's proposal and took a plunge in the Arsenic broth....what happened if I accidentally took in a mouthful ?

Here's the link to Nasa's Report

Extinction threat to one fifth of world's plants

Saw this grim heading from AFP citing recent studies from Kew.

Stephen Hopper, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew was quoted as saying "This study confirms what we already suspected, that plants are under threat and the main cause is human-induced habitat loss"

....well , not new, but perhaps now they can put a number to it ....

Especially threatened is the habitat of tropical forest, which has been converted to agricultural land. Human activity accounted for 81 percent of threats, according to Kew researcher Neil Brummitt.

Here's another snippet :

Plants were more threatened than birds, as threatened as mammals and less threatened than amphibians or corals, it said. Gymnosperms, the plant group including fir trees, were the most threatened.

Well....ok....so what can we do about it ?

Rather then just leaving it to a handful of institutions, I suppose if each serious gardener can adopt just one or two species - propagate them well and send them off to interested parties all over the world, then this could lighten the load. But unfortunately, things are not so simple - even if there are gardeners with inclination and expertise, we still have to overcome regional politics, CITES, customs and security red tapes and the like ....

....enough muttering, back to the garden.

You can see full reports all over the web, but here's one from yahoo

Addenda:

In response to rohrerbot's comment, I did a rough calculation - we can actually pack everyone in the world into a land mass the size of Sweden if we can accept living conditions equivalent to people from the Korean capital of Seoul (hey, I am not talking about Mumbai here), and leave the rest of our planet to the wildlife and plants. Its a rough guide but it just goes to show how much can be improved upon if there is a will.

Basis of my calculations :
world population of 6871600000
Population density of Seoul 167000
Sweden land mass 450 000 sq/km

A New species of Nepenthes

ALASTAIR S. ROBINSON et al has discovered a new highland species from the Phillippines. They have named it after Sir David Attenborough, who is incidentally, one of my favourite TV icon and naturalist. Needless to say , N. attenboroughii is rare and highly endangered, and probably even more so now that its habitat has been published ....



Photo from Terraforums.com
Ref:
A spectacular new species of Nepenthes L. (Nepenthaceae) pitcher plant from central Palawan, Philippines
Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society
Volume 159 Issue 2, Pages 195 - 202

Dry

Is this somewhere in Somalia ? Ethiopia ?
.... Moon ?

Actually, its the surface of the great butress trunk of a Kapok tree Ceiba pentandra, tilted 90 degrees.

It has been almost two months without rain. This January is the dryest month in Singapore for the past 10 years. Only 38.3 mm of rainfall was recorded, a far cry from the long-term average of 244 mm.

A stream at Kalimantan border

The guide brought us to a jungle path through the jungle, thick with interesting undergrowths, with pebbled stream teaming with barbs and rasboras. It was one of the most pleasant jungle walk I ever did. We trodded along this pristine land blissfully with no sense of time .... kind of like a honeymoon....

Then a thunder clap brought us to our senses.

We had to make a hasty U-turn before reaching the destination - a tall waterfall – as an impending storm in the mountains threatened to submerge the jungle path and cut off our return route criss-crossing the stream.

Reluctant I may be, I had to tell myself always to listen to the local guide when one is in unfamiliar territory. Water accumulated high in the mountain can turn a benign stream like this into raging torrents very quickly. Some of my mates have had nasty experiences of evacuating their tents overnight while camping beside a small stream due to flash flood. Just last month, a couple of Singapore city sleekers ignored the advice of a guide and was caught in a flash flood at a waterfall. They were lucky, but the heroic guide was not.

Read more here

My old web site

Just a little note....this is my old website that I had started around year 2000. There was no broadband then and the uploading took ages, especially for those pics intensive pages. Anyway it was a very inconvenient medium for constant uploading and I had aborted the project in 2003. Still, even now I think its a decent read for 30minutes or so.
East Asian Flora Web at Tripod

Cheers

A Dayak bamboo bridge

A hundred years ago, Alfred Russel Wallace noted "Bamboo is one of the most wonderful and most beautiful productions of the tropics, and one of nature's most valuable gifts to uncivilised man." One can hardly say they are uncivilised nowadays, although many Dayaks still stayed in longhouses at the edge of modernity. This bridge looked exactly as what Wallace had described a hundred years ago, they have lost none of their masterful skills to harness this gift.

For me, crossing these wobbling bridges hanging 20 metres or so above the river was a leap of faith. It was almost like walking on tightrope except for the handrail, which by the way was so shaky I would not dare rest too much weight on them. It did not help to see that the thin wire cables that was used to fasten the bamboo poles were rusted....

A couple of months or so after my crossing, one of the bridges collapsed and 2 people fell down - fortunately there was no serious injury.

Rediscovery of Rafflesia schadenbergiana

....what a mouthful, but this is the rarest of the 5 species of Rafflesia in the Phillippines (and counting)- in fact it has not been seen for more than 100 years prior to this rediscovery - albeit on a single Tetrastima vine.... its existance is literally hanging on a string ....

goto link

New Begonia Species

A new species from Northern Vietnam - Begonia kui. In was actually found in a Taiwan flower market for sometime before taxonomists found it naturally in Nam.
Source: Botanical Studies - Volume 48 Number 1 January 2007 (Pg 127).

Anyone has this to trade ?

Tiger Debate

An interesting article appeared in Straits Times today.
A Chinese farmer from Shanxi published photos of a nearly extinct subspecies of tiger in the wild. Supposedly, he took 71 shots of the animal. The photos made it to the acclaimed Science Magazine in October 2007. Then, internet users and experts started doubting the photos. He eventualy posted a confession of his wrongdoing in his blog, but later dismissed it as coming from a hacker(!!). Apparently, local forestry authorities were on his side, which complicated matters quite a bit. The debate appeared to be settled when an exact image of the animal was found to be published by Vista Printing and Wrapping Co. Ltd, ....in 2002 !
Anyway, I post a photo here for comments and reference.


If you ask me, ....which nobody did, coming from a photographer's point, I would find it hard to take this photograph without a fill-in flash to bring out the brilliant colours of the animal under the shade....but this would mean he could not have taken 71 shots could he ?

GardenTech is here

7-11 Dec 2007 @ HortPark.
HortPark ? That's new to me .... must check out ! Interesting to note its free this year ....
Click here to see more

Garden by the Bay

More on this massive project

channelnewsasia link

Saving China's plants

Here's a story that touches me, the spirit of the guy I mean, but take out the tissue, its a weepie....

See the Worldwatch Site

There will be more to add to the casualty list where the "functionally extinct" Chinese River Dolphin is firmly anchored. The three gorges dam which will symbolise and propel China's new wealth will at the same time impoverish its ecological heritage.

Some months back I was collecting plants at a site where a dam will be built in 2010.... I hope my plants will have a happier ending....

Singapore buys Tropiflora

Herald Tribune link

Some background:
Tropiflora is a collectors' nursery specialising in bromeliads.
"Gardens by the Bay" will be situated where the future casino complex will be.

Some people will recall that Singapore made a similar conquest buying over stuff from a bromeliad nursery based in Pacifica (1 hour drive from San Francisco) in 1994. The result is Lady McNeice Bromeliad House in the Singapore Botanical Garden. A couple of friends were doing some temp-time work then and they painted a sad picture. People who visited the place then and now would have reached a similar conculsion. An internet source counted that of the 200 species of air plants acquired, only 20 survived a few years later. Many species that grew well in temperate SF did not do well here and would not flower. We are talking history here. Of course Tropiflora is based in a more tropical Florida east coast - still it does not mean they do not have temperate stuff from S. America.

This resembles a technology transfer situation at my workplace - "copy-smart" or "copy-exact" ? Local top dogs seem to think that transfer wholesale and paying full price for it will replicate success, actually .....I am digressing again.

So well, I will be looking forward to the opening of the Garden, like they say "see it before its gone !"

Begonia eiromischa

According to the 2007 IUCN Red List, Begonia eiromischa from Penang is now officaially extinct. Actually, it has been "unofficially" extinct for more than 10 years already as the only stream where it was found was destroyed. If only a collector had salvaged some plants, like Begonia rajah, which was thought to be extinct for many years but existed widely in cultivation.

see link

New Plants and Animals Species found in VietNam

A new snake, some new orchids and black flowered Apidistra found in Central VietNam.

Nat Geo Website

New species of PNG orchids

Some new species and some old favourites from Papua New Guinea

See BBC link

Ever wondered why, then, are so few people going there ? Safety is a main concern for casual visitors. Crime rate is high in the capital and rural folks have their own rules .... as testified by a couple of people I spoke to who went there. One group was pursued by armed villagers for reasons note known to them and another was detained in a hut for 2 days for trespassing. They escaped unscathed but its not a welcome any visitor would relish. Reading "Islands of the Clouds" by Isabella Tree, I got a glimpse of the problems - the 1000 or so tribes and more than 600 languages present a major problem for standardisation and integration - and a brewing pot for distrusts since the beginning of time. In fact in a recent BBC coverage heard over the radio, the army chief was immensely confident that unlike many African countries, a military coup in his country is impossible due to its heterogeniety. And then of course there is this familiar problem of displaced indigenous people, who left their land and got lost in the city.... any way I am digressing....