Stopping to smell the flowers

In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind. — Louis Pasteur, 1854

Science is awash with stories about chance discoveries. Drug research, materials science, microbiology and biodiversity studies have had their share of accidental breakthroughs over the centuries. However, as Pasteur, the famous French chemist and microbiologist, so appropriately stated it, discovery requires both serendipity and acuity. Chance brings us face-to-face with something new but we need our minds to make us recognize the novelty of what we are looking at.

Although the bulk of science is all about meticulous planning, methodical experimentation and careful analysis, it doesn’t hurt to stop and smell the flowers every now and then. This advice becomes more relevant when one eventually realizes that the flowers s/he has been sniffing happen to be unknown to science. To a certain extent, this was what we experienced in May 2013.

I was with fellow faculty members and students of the Biology Department of UP Baguio on a field surveying trek through the forests of Adams, Ilocos Norte. We clung tightly to the steep slopes of the mountain as we made our way into the forest, laying out lengths of a very long measuring tape, setting up animal cage traps here and there, and taking photos of plants and animals. I was the last person in the single file of excited explorers — trying my best to keep up without losing my foothold and initiating an avalanche (of embarrassment, mostly). As the bulk of the team rounded a bend in the trail, I heard synchronized shrieks from some of the junior faculty. Fearing someone had fallen off, I caught up with them and found them oohing and aahing over something that was shooting up from the steep forest floor — a very tall flower stalk of an Amorphophallus.

The Amorphophallus is a group of plants closely related to the gabi (taro plant). This plant is unique for three reasons: there’s only one leaf and flower per growing season, the flower looks weird, and it smells just as weird. Think of this plant as a grotesque calla lily. Its name literally means a shapeless phallus and some species found in nearby provinces are referred to as uten lakay (an Ilocano reference to an old man’s member). To attract pollinators, majority of which happen to be flies, some species exude a pungent stench not unlike rotting flesh, thus the names corpse flower and stink blooms have stuck to some species.

So where is the serendipitous part in this story? We weren’t even planning on studying this species. We were looking for something else — another funky-smelling flower known as the Rafflesia, and probably some new species of predatory plants called pitcher plants. We were aware that there would be Amorphophallus plants in the area; the locals told us they have seen them in the forest even before we made the trek. They also told us they had no use for them except as feed for their pigs. The acuity part? The junior faculty in our team took the initiative to study the plant and were meticulous enough to document, dissect and distinguish the plant and its parts from published records of other Amorphophallus species. All efforts paid off when we were able to establish that it was indeed a new species: Amorphophallus adamsensis. A paper about the discovery subsequently got published in Blumea, an international peer-reviewed journal on plant taxonomy and geography, early this year.

The discovery and publication about this new plant — or any new species — is never the end of the story. It is actually the seed to initiate steps at protecting the forest where it was found. The Cordillera and Northern Luzon remain to be poorly explored areas yet are continually faced with human-induced degradation. Before we lose our national and natural heritage as a major center of biodiversity on earth, we need to conserve and protect our treasure trove of organisms. However, how does documenting species help? To loosely paraphrase what slain UP botanist Leonard Co expressed years ago, we answer this with a question: How can we protect what we do not know? UP Baguio’s mandate to be of service to the Cordillera region (including the rest of Northern Luzon) includes letting people, both the ordinary and the powerful, know what we have and realize what we stand to lose if we allow the decimation of our remaining natural ecosystems. Like many other areas of study, this will always be our challenge and our niche as the UP of the North. 

* * *

An earlier version of this article was published in the January 2014 issue of “Ti Similla,” the official publication of UP Baguio.

* * *

Romeo M. Dizon, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in biology at the University of the Philippines Baguio. E-mail at [email protected].