te to repeatedly refer to Amorphophallus.
Bohs says the genus belongs to the family Araceae, commonly known as the arum or aroid family. The family includes philodendrons, taro root (from which Hawaiians make poi), skunk cabbage and anthurium, a plant common in floral arrangements, with a yellow spadix surrounded by a leafy, red, heart-shaped spathe.
Wahlert says plants in the genus Amorphophallus are found in southern Asia, the South Pacific, Australia and Africa, including Madagascar. Of the 170 or so species in the genus, which first was discovered in 1834, “a lot have been known for 150 years, but one, two or three new species are described every year,” he adds.
A. titanum grows naturally only in Sumatra in Indonesia, although it is found around the world in greenhouses that compete for the largest corpse flower plant. The Guinness Book of Records title currently is held by a New Hampshire specimen that had a spadix measuring 10-feet-2.25-inches tall in 2010. Counting the stem and spadix, A. titanum can reach 20 feet tall, compared with a 5-foot maximum for A. perrieri, which has a longer stem and shorter spadix – about 10 inches long in the case of the one that bloomed on campus.
New Species Collected from a Burial Island
Wahlert collected the new species from Nosy Mitsio and Nosy Ankarea – two islands northwest of Madagascar, which is off the east coast of Africa. “Nosy” means island in the Malagasy language. The plant since has been found on Madagascar.
He had to obtain permission from a local village to visit Nosy Ankarea, an uninhabited, half-mile-wide island where the Sakalava people buried their rulers. Unlike Ankarea, which is still vegetated, Mitsio is heavily deforested. A. perrieri was found there in low scrub behind beach dunes.
“I went there in 2006 to collect tree violets, and when I got there I discovered these Amorphophallus in full bloom on the first day in the field,” cutting and collecting four or five specimens, Wahlert says. “That night I got malaria. I stayed there a week but was so sick I couldn’t do much collecting.”
After the trip, Wahlert showed the specimens to Dutch botanist Wilbert Hetterscheid of Wageningen University. Hetterscheid, an expert on Amorphophallus, said they were a new species, and is co-authoring the descriptive paper with Wahlert.
In October 2007, Wahlert went back to the islands at the end of the dry season, and once again the new species were in full bloom. He collected 15 tubers – the roots – so he could grow the plants.
Wahlert kept the live plants at various institutions where he worked and gave others away, ending up with one left when he moved to Utah last fall.
Why should anyone care about a stinking plant with a suggestive shape?
“It’s not high-tech, but it’s still important to describe new species, to document biodiversity, particularly in a place like Madagascar, which is one of the world’s great biodiversity hotspots,” Wahlert says. “It’s been severely deforested and is continuing to be deforested. So it’s important to document new species before they go extinct.”University of Utah Public Relations
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