Researchers working on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao have possibly uncovered an unidentified species of rafflesia. Dr Domingo Madulid, a curator at the National Museum’s botany division who is leading the expedition in the forests of Compostela Valley province, suggested the name Rafflesia magnifica for the flower.
“The team’s discovery of such a rare and critically endangered flower in the municipality of Maragusan shows the critical need to protect the area,” Mr Madulid said, adding a paper had been submitted to Blumea, a Netherlands-based scientific journal on plant taxonomy and plant geography which regulates plant nomenclature.
Mr Madulid further asked local newspapers to refrain from revealing the flower’s exact location out of fears that onlookers might inadvertently destroy the flower or its vine. If ratified, the flower will be only the fourth rafflesia found across the Philippine archipelago: the Rafflesia manillana is found in Luzon, Samar and Leyte; the Rafflesia speciosa is found in the Sibalom Natural Park in Antique; the Rafflesia schadenbergiana, whose flower measured 80 centimeters, was discovered in 1882 but is currently thought to be extinct
The new flower has a bloom which measures 60-70 centimeters in diameter. A related cousin, the Rafflesia arnoldi found in Sumatra, Indonesia, can measure up to a meter in diameter and its bloom is recognized as the world’s largest in the Guinness Book of World Records.
“But it can be tricky to catch one in bloom, much more measure it,” Mr Madulid said. “For most of the year, rafflesias remain in their bud stage, which lasts to about a year. Furthermore, not all buds develop to maturity and when they do, these pale creamy orange flowers usually last less than five days.”
The flower’s existence was first made public during a television program which aired in 2003. The director of the World Wildlife Fund Philippines, Lorenzo Tan, alerted researchers of the new species after viewing the broadcast.
“Its exact identity was not known then. When Lorenzo Tan, a wildlife enthusiast and now director of the World Wildlife Fund Philippines notified our office, we organized a team and went to Maragusan in October to look for the flower and identify it,” Mr Madulid said.
The rafflesia genus’s name derives from its discoverers: Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, a naturalist and British colonial administrator, and Dr. Joseph Arnold, a botanist. The two came upon the flower in 1919 near the town of Bengkulu in Sumatra; the species they discovered was the Rafflesia arnoldii. Over 20 species of rafflesia have since been recognized, although researchers believe many may have been extinct for several years.
Once the flower has bloomed, it produces a “stinking corpse” smell that attracts flies which pollinate it. A male and a female rafflesia must bloom concurrently for pollination to occur.
“Much more, the rafflesia has no specific flowering season. It has no roots, stems or leaves. In addition, each flower produces thousands of seeds and these seeds can only germinate if they succeed in lodging in the tissue of the tetrastigma vine, which crawls on rainforest floors,” Mr Madulid said. For this reason, the flower usually grows near the ground. The parasitic flower nourishes itself by extending filaments into vines from the genus Tetrastigma.
“Its penchant for attaching exclusively to the tetrastigma partly explains why the flower is very rare and why we also need to protect the vine it attaches to,” Mr Madulid said. Edward S. Ross, an entomologist, wrote that foresters often destroy the vine to reduce competition for trees. This practice leads to the destruction of the rafflesia’s ecosystem.
