Daily Times

MANILA: Five new orchid species have been discovered in remote Philippine mountains, protected from poaching due to an ongoing insurgency, conservationists said on Friday.

The species are only found in a mountain range on the rebellion-torn Mindanao area in the southern Philippines and has eluded those cataloguing plants lives for over 200 years, expert Miguel David de Leon told AFP. Poaching of wild orchids, mostly by locals, is extensive in the Philippines, while some communities illegally harvest them without permits to export or to sell them along roadsides.

The Mindanao region faces one of the longest-running insurgencies in Asia and the Maoist guerrillas retain support from the poor farming and mountainous communities. “The insurgency problem helps prevent poachers or would-be orchid-hunters from entering the forests,” said De Leon, who found the species while trekking the mountains of Bukidnon province in Mindanao.

“These areas are very isolated. The terrain is treacherous, accessible only by foot and occasionally a motorcycle or a horse,” he added. The finds, first published in the German Orchideen Journal this year, include a dazzling yellow bloom flecked with brown spots.

He said, “It is one of the most attractive members of the genus,” and added, “(The) other species are red or purple but this really stands out because of its bright yellow shade.” De Leon, Australian taxonomist Jim Cootes and Filipino research associate Mark Arcebal Naive named their most vivid find Epicrianthes aquinoi, to honour the outgoing Philippine President Benigno Aquino whose family uses the colour yellow in their political rallies.

They discovered other species which include a pure white and a red-lipped white Dendrobium, a dark red Epicrianthes and a green slipper orchid with red stripes. Cootes, author of three books on Philippine orchids, told AFP that such discoveries displayed the rich biodiversity of the Southeast Asian nation and said that more species were awaiting discovery.

“We need to preserve what’s left because the variation within the different species is so high that it is almost priceless,” Cootes said and added, “The mountains throughout the archipelago need to be preserved.”

The US-based Conservation International lists Philippines among the 35 biodiversity hotspots – areas with the world’s richest but most threatened plant and animal life. Deforestation in the mountainous areas of Philippines also destroys orchid habitats as well as shrubs, fungi and algae that keep the forests alive.