Amorphophallus titanum conservation

From: Brian OBrien <bobrien at gac.edu> on 1997.09.07 at 22:49:46(1179) Regarding the recent suggestion of donation of Amorphophallus titanum plants (from the Symon expedition seeds and other sources) to botanical gardens or other institutions where they can be preserved, I've had this intention with my plants since the beginning. If people on the list know of institutions which would like to have plants of this species, I think that perhaps a distribution could be worked out. I currently have plants growing in the greenhouse of our local biology department, and a promise of plants to the Iowa State University greenhouse. My largest one is currently about 40" tall, with the stem being about 2" in diameter at the base. The others are smaller, mainly from constraint in smaller pots. It might be getting a bit late in the year to ship the plants, but if anyone on the list knows of appropriate sites for donation, I'd like to hear about them. Shipment next spring or summer should be easy to work out. There's been a good bit of discussion on the cacti_etc list about the potential lack of value of preservation of plants through cultivation, based largely on the ideas of propagation of "greenhouse races", loss of other genetic diversity, inadvertent hybridization, etc. In addition, preservation of the entire habitat is, of course, of much greater value than plucking selected species from it for cultivation, even for conservaiton purposes. I personally think that many of the contentions (except for the last one, which isn't always possible) suffer greatly from a lack of data. They are hypothetical in the sense that genetic variability, survivability as re-introductions, etc., have not been quantitated for most of the species under consideration. Preservation of A. titanum in cultivation is possibly an exception to these types of largely hypothetical arguments. There's little likelihood, I would imagine, of hybridization going unrecognized; the species is possibly under imminent danger of extinction in the wild due to collection for manufacture of cosmetics; and the natural gene pool might show little variation from plant to plant. I saw a mention of the last possibility on this list at some past time, but don't know if data has been obtained to support it. Brian O'Brien +More -- Brian A. O'Brien, Department of Chemistry, Gustavus Adolphus College Saint Peter, Minnesota 56082 U.S.A. e-mail bobrien@gac.edu tel. (507)933-7310 fax (507)933-7041

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