Martin Cheek first entered the Boyboyba Forest in southeastern Guinea in September 2022 to look for an extremely rare plant whose entire population is estimated to number just 100. The weather, though, had dampened his enthusiasm. “You’re a long way from anywhere that’s dry, and you’re going to be here all day, and it’s pouring with rain, and it’s not going to be very comfortable,” the plant taxonomist from the U.K.’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, recalls. All that changed when Cheek and his Guinean colleagues found a patch of the extremely rare snow-white flowers growing on the forest floor. “You forget about any discomfort you might be feeling: just the excitement of confronting these amazing plants takes that all out of your mind,” he says. The plants are a species of Gymnosiphon, a genus that comprises a few dozen species scattered across Africa, Madagascar, Asia and Central and South America. Gymnosiphon fonensis, Boyboyba Forest, Guinea. Image courtesy Martin Cheek. Another group of scientists had noted these flowers growing in the very same spot in Boyboyba 14 years earlier, but they were misidentified as Gymnosiphon bekensis, a species that only grows more than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) away to the east, in Cameroon and the Central African Republic. Cheek has now corrected that, identifying Boyboyba’s plants as a new-to-science species, Gymnosiphon fonensis, named in honor of the Pic de Fon classified forest, a partially protected reserve at the southern end of the Simandou mountain range. Like all Gymnosiphon species, the Fon…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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South Africa Today – Environment
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