Local botanist discovers new species in Peru

Local botanist discovers new species in Peru

By Alison Damas tStaff Writer

Published February 6 2007

STAMFORD - Botanist Eric Morgan was in a boat traveling down the Orosa River in Peru last January when a felled tree trunk in the water halted his journey.Morgan and fellow botanist Jon Sperling decided to get out of the boat and explore while they waited for help. They spent the next hour-and-a-half gathering plants along the edge of the tributary, including one in the genus Dracontium, commonly known as Jergon Sacha.

They noticed it had several striking characteristics, including an unusual leaf segment pattern, with large and small leaves opposite each other."We were looking at it from the side of a boat and said, 'This looks kind of different. Let's take it back to New York,' " said Morgan, collections manager at the Bartlett Arboretum & Gardens in Stamford.

In America, the pair grew the plant under greenhouse conditions for 18 months and realized they had found a new species. They named it Dracontium iquitense, after the city of Iquitos in northeastern Peru, the closest large city to where they discovered it.

This summer, Morgan and Sperling, a biology professor at Queens College in New York, will publish a paper on the new species in Aroideana, a yearly academic journal devoted to the study of plants that belong to the Aracae family.One of the plants now grows in the greenhouse of the Bartlett Arboretum, where Morgan is studying it and monitoring its growth.

The plant has grown a stem with leaves that is about 2 feet tall and has not flowered. In the spring, Morgan expects the plant will stand 8 feet tall."It's not all that impressive in the middle of winter," he said.The plant has drawn the attention of Jack Dillon, Bartlett's executive director, who said he is impressed that Morgan picked out a new species in the middle of a rainforest.

"I think people like to say there is nothing new under the sun, and I think it is nice to have that proven wrong every now and then," Dillon said.Morgan, who is pursing a doctorate degree in botany at City University of New York, has long been fascinated by Jergon Sacha. He learned about it when he was an undergraduate at Stony Brook University and watched a video on plants belonging to the genus Dracontium.

He was intrigued when he learned the flower smelled like rotting meat and set out to learn more about the plant, including its medicinal properties."I just thought it was interesting from an evolutionary standpoint," Morgan said. "The plants tend to have different pollinators and tend to tailor their scents to different insect groups."There are 23 known species of the plant; 13 of them grow in South America and the Caribbean.

Morgan took his first trip to the Iquitos region of Peru in 2002 and interviewed residents about how they use the plant in everyday life, eventually publishing a paper on the topic in Aroideana."In rural areas, people lash the stems against their legs to prevent snake bites. Tribes that have more contact with modern medicine take the root, known as a corm, and crush it for use as a topical remedy for snake bites, Morgan said.

Pharmacists in large cities sell the crushed root in bottles and claim that it can cure HIV and cancer."It was neat to see how the use of it changed as you went from rural areas with little contact with the medicine world to big cities," he said.

Morgan plans to continue his study of the plant, preserving samples in formaldehyde and alcohol.He remains modest about his discovery and attributes it to the years he spent studying the evolution and structure of the plant."You end up looking at so many of them that you know them pretty well," he said.