Folks my duck met this week

My duck took Monday off to attend the first day of the 4th International Symposium on the Family Zingiberaceae. I thought I knew my Alpinias, Kaempferias, Etlingeras, Boesenbergias, Globbas and Hedychiums but it turns out that a huge number of new genera (there is even an African genus, Siphonochilus, which is thought to be basal for the clade) and even a whole new subfamily have been described in recent years, with some species enjoying a long history of knowledge by local peoples prior to a belated acknowledgement by botanists.

From keynote speaker Kai Larsen, I learnt that Smithatris and Cornukaempferia are genera endemic to Thailand, the latter being an unusual group with Kaempferia-like foliage but Zingiber-like flowers. Smithatris supraneanae is a species first collected in limestone hills north of Bangkok and is used as cut flowers and in Buddhist ceremonies by local inhabitants, as it flowers during the Buddhist Lent period – an ethnobotanic heritage that had escaped scientists until the late 1990s. 

Professor Larsen also showed slides of Rhynchanthus beesianus, an endangered limestone species with inflorescenes that rival those of its distant cousins the Birds of Paradise or Strelitzias from South America. Even more elusive is Siamanthus siliquosus, a taxon discovered by a collector near the Thai-Malaysian border, brought to private nurseries and came to botanical attention when Professor Larsen found it flowering in a Danish greenhouse and described it in 1998. To date, nobody knows the exact locality of this ginger, assuming it still exists. Zingibereceae presently houses some 1,400 species, but Professor Larsen reckons that many regions in Asia remain undersampled, especially Myanmar and Indochina, where isolated mountain ranges favour the evolution of local endemics, and the true count may well be much greater than expected.

During the tea break, I found to my surprise that at least one other participant of the symposium was no authority on gingers, but rather probably the world's foremost student of aroids – that sexy family of plants with brazen (and often stinky) reproductive strategies cloaked in chaste spathes. Since the 1960s, Josef Bogner has travelled throughout the tropics in search of new aroids, naming 54 species in the process. His trips were largely self-funded, as his day job was being inspector of the Munich Botanic Gardens (located next to the lovely Schloss Nymphenburg which houses a gallery of Teutonic beauties ravished by King Ludwig I), but the Ludwig Maximillians University of Munich recognised his contributions with an honorary Ph.D in 2004. As a systematist, he has produced invaluable work in making taxonomic sense of an immense family with 107 genera, countless tribes and over 3,700 species. I should like to add that his lavish book The Genera of Araceae (available at Nature's Niche) is on my wishlist....

Aquarists would recognise his name from the nomenclatural tributes given to Bogner in the genera Cryptocoryne, Lagenandra, Stylochaeton, Dracontium and Aponogeton (the latter not an aroid – he also has a Begonia named after him). I am sure he was as surprised shocked to see a rabidly fawning duck me as I was to find him chugging down glasses of fruit punch at the Herbarium, upon which I attempted to engage him in a discussion on undescribed Cryptocorynes in Malaysia, many of which he suspects to be natural hybrids, being sterile. He was in Singapore en route to Sarawak for yet another field trip and before shaking off my duck for conversaion with less quackery, he revealed that a new (and much needed) book on Malayan Cryptocorynes is in preparation by co-worker Niels Jacobsen.

At fate would have it, Jac aka husky was also at the centre, manning a corner dedicated to tempting the delegates into an afternoon at Sungei Buloh. Like the currently marooned monkey, Jac makes me sort of regret the loss of nearly a decade during which I turned my back to the wet and weird creatures that crawled into my pants life as a ducklet in the Malaysian wilderness. Folks like her give me a sliver of hope that the future of the earth, at least for those who stand to inherit it, may be less bleak than is warranted by naturally pessimistic duck. The only blot on the plot is that she's a Nikonian...

Comments

[Xi]

It kills me that she's a Nikonian. Her hair doesnt look all that different from before.

hey there. i'm ryan, so admiistrator, gcs.

just saw your post on gcs pertaining IGS. i was there EVERYDAY.... bleah... haha... we're putting up an article within the week on gcs. cheers :)