It’s a miracle!

Marie Selby Botanical Gardens botanist John Clark was part of a team of botanists who recently discovered a brand-new plant species called Amalophyllon miraculum in western Ecuador's Centinela Ridge region. The tiny, 2-inch plant, with its iridescent foliage and ephemeral white flowers, was found in a farmer’s backyard. It’s called the “miracle plant” because that yard was in an area scientists had largely assumed was hostile to plant life due to deforestation and agricultural development.

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by John L. Clark (@phinaea)

Selby Gardens has a long history of making research expeditions to Ecuador, and the work of its late botanists Alwyn Gentry and Calaway Dodson—the latter of whom was also the gardens’ first executive director—brought attention to the sweeping loss of vegetation in the Centinela Ridge's cloud forests due of agricultural development. The loss of native plant life, including orchids and epiphytes, was so devastating that the late biologist E. O. Wilson coined the term “Centinelan extinction” to describe the extinction of a plant species before scientists are able to properly document it.

As it turns out, Wilson was Clark’s Ph.D. advisor when he was earning his doctorate in evolutionary biology and systematic biodiversity—and Clark remembers talking to Wilson about Centinelan extinction before his death. 

Now, thanks to the discovery of Amalophyllon miraculum, Clark and other botanists are hopeful that other types of plant life in the region haven't disappeared entirely.

“We named the plant Amalophyllon miraculum because [finding it in that] area is a miracle,” says Clark. “We wanted to come up with a name that reflected the area where it was found and bring attention to the community about [the region’s] biological importance.”

Small swaths of land, or forest fragments, like the one where the miracle plant is found, are usually surrounded by agricultural landscapes, Clark explains. “They’re usually there because an enlightened farmer decided to keep them—maybe they liked the waterfalls, or the forest was soothing—but they didn’t cut them down like everyone else," he says. "Sometimes they’re really small, but then you walk into them and find things we thought were extinct.” He calls the farmers “heroic” for deciding to keep forest fragments intact.

And, he says, people are responding to the news by taking action. The Fundación Jocotoco, an influential Ecuadorian non-governmental organization that usually focuses on bird conservation, funded some of Clark’s team’s work on the miracle plant because of its biological uniqueness. Now, the foundation is working with local landowners and botanical gardens like the Jardín Botánico Nacional in nearby Santo Domingo to grow critically endangered plants in their greenhouses.

“There’s funding now to more thoroughly inventory the biodiversity of some of these forest fragments,” Clark says. “The community is coming together to work to conserve them.”

In addition to being part of the team that discovered the miracle plant, Clark is the lead author on a new paper titled "Amalophyllon miraculum (Gesneriaceae), an exceptionally small lithophilous new species from the western Andean slopes of Ecuador," which was published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal PhytoKeys in June.

While most people know Selby Gardens for its beautiful bayfront location and stunning collection of orchids, Clark is quick to point out that the gardens also stands out for its emphasis on research. “We have a group of researchers who are actively looking at evolutionary relationships and documenting plants in very unique areas,” he says. “Pretty soon, we’ll have our herbarium online, and people can look at the specimens. It’s going to be an amazing, important tool.”

He’s sharing his knowledge with the next generation, too. An adjunct professor of biology at New College of Florida, Clark took a group of 14 students to Ecuador in January and says some of them are working on research projects with him at Selby Gardens. He travels to Ecuador every two to three months.

“It’s not enough to say, ‘The forest is important,’ especially nowadays,” Clark says. “You have to give reasons why, and biodiversity is a way to communicate to the broader community about why an area needs to be conserved. We are able to use the taxonomy of plants to provide information about why areas are unique.”