Botanist’s Love of Plants Budded in Ecuador
By Chris Bryant
When some people refer to “rural,” you think of farmland just outside small-town Alabama. When John Clark refers to “rural,” he’s talking two days’ travel from the nearest road. Clark frequently travels to rural parts of the world, often the rain forest of northwestern Ecuador, typically in search of flowers undocumented by science. “I’m fascinated by biodiversity,” the 38-year-old University of Alabama botanist says. “I’ve always been interested in knowing my natural surroundings and identifying – whatever it was – a bug, a plant or a bird. What got to me, finally, living in the tropics, were the plants. They were totally overwhelming. You’re talking about major canopy trees being a new species to science – things loggers had known about for decades and no botanist had ever collected.” In the mid-1990s, forestry degree in hand, Clark, as a Peace Corps volunteer, lived at the Bilsa Biological Station in the Mache-Chindul Mountains of Ecuador. “I kept sending images and making collections and bugging scientists about what some of the common things were … and getting responses like, ‘I don’t know,’ or ‘figure it out for yourself.’ The only way to do it was by looking at collections.”
Such unanswered questions prompted Clark to return to school for his doctorate, and, following an eight-year stint as a graduate student and then research associate at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, he now serves as curator of UA’s Herbarium, home to a collection of some 70,000 plant specimens. Recently, Clark discovered a new plant species he calls Chewbacca (after the Wookie in the “Star Wars” movies). Published in the July 2008 issue of the Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, Clark’s discovery and description of the species is one of his more unusual Ecuadorian Rain Forest finds. Its blooms consist of a thick clump of long, wooly hairs. The plant’s scientific name is Kohleria hypertrichosa. This is derived from the congenital condition of generalized “hypertrichosis,” the medical term referring to a condition of excessive growth of body hair in humans and commonly known as “Werewolf Syndrome.” “Every time, I’ve introduced this into cultivation, and I’ve done it three times, it’s died,” Clark says. This time, he hopes, will be different. It’s presently growing in a greenhouse at the UA Arboretum under the care of Mary Jo Modica, the director of UA’s Arboretum. “It’s got six leaves on it,” Clark says. “My hat’s off to Mary Jo for being able to keep this thing alive.” Clark doesn’t know whether the plant, based off a cutting he snipped from the Andean Cloud Forest, will actually produce one of its trademark hairy blooms while sitting inside a greenhouse in Alabama.
While discovering, collecting and classifying new plants is rewarding, the faculty member in UA’s College of Arts and Sciences, says that’s not his overriding goal. “I’m focused on one group of plants (Gesneriaceae, of which African violets are a type) and base my evolutionary studies on those. But, knowing that group, I’ve been able to address a lot of interesting things about diversification, about pollination biology and understanding the remarkable diversity of floral forms in this group.” And, when he’s focusing his camera’s lens on documenting biodiversity in the field, there’s another term, besides rural, that Clark seems to take to a whole new level. When he’s “pointing and shooting,” you can be sure that no moss is growing under his feet. “I can walk 20 rainforest kilometers (about 12 miles) in a day and still take 200 to 300 pictures. I don’t do any real photography with natural light. I just know how to photograph a few things very well.” To get a glimpse of some of Clark’s flower photography see http://bama.ua.edu/~jlclark4/, and click on “image library.” Further Reading