Biologist Dr Ruth Kiew of the Forest Research Institute Malaysia has described a beautiful new species of plant from the Peninsular Malaysia.
Ridleyandra chuana (Ruth Kiew)
The new species, called Ridleyandra chuana, is endemic to the region and only known from two small montane forest populations.
Ridleyandra chuana is a perennial herb with a woody usually unbranched stem crowned by an asymmetrical rosette of dark green leaves covered in fine hairs.
The beautiful and delicate cone-like flowers are white with dark maroon purple stripes. They rarely appear in more than two in one go usually flowering in succession. Ridleyandra chuana grows on moss-covered granite rock embedded in soil or on low moss-covered granite boulders, in extremely damp, deeply shaded conditions on steep slopes in valleys.
Ridleyandra chuana is named in honor of Dr Lillian Swee Lian Chua, botanist and conservationist, who first discovered it on Gunung Ulu Kali while making an ecological inventory of the summit flora.
Flower of Ridleyandra chuana (Ruth Kiew)
“The population at Fraser’s Hill falls within a Totally Protected Area and consists of about 30 plants that grow in an undisturbed site away from tourist trails and is too remote to be affected by development,” said Dr Kiew, who describes the new species in a paper in the journal PhytoKeys.
“The other population consists of less than 100 plants at Gunung Ulu Kali, which is on private land in a hill resort that is severely threatened by road widening and associated landslips, by changes in microclimate due to edge effect as the forest becomes more and more fragmented and that is in danger of encroachment from future development.”
“The chances of this latter population surviving is very slim. On the other hand, the rediscovery of the Fraser’s Hill population after a hundred years illustrates the resilience of species to survive if the habitat remains undisturbed.”
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Bibliographic information: Ruth Kiew. 2013. Ridleyandra chuana (Gesneriaceae), a new species from Peninsular Malaysia. PhytoKeys 25: 15–19; doi: 10.3897/phytokeys.25.5178
