Ok, please brace yourself for the conclusion of this gripping story. Today the truth will be revealed.

If you have followed the previous posts (here are the first and second) you will know that having blogged rather long-windedly about Bwindi’s supposed wild bananas I then discovered that there were no official records of these plants occurring in the National Park.  I then worried that I had been too hasty in my assessment. Maybe these plants were not wild at all, but were just like the millions of others planted around the park by local farmers. There is only one way to know for sure: clear evidence. Do the fruits have seeds or not? (Wild plants have seeds, while domestic bananas are seedless).

So … I planned a short outing to check. I needed a break and this was an excuse to escape the office for a couple of hours and to pursue cutting edge science (fun) at the same time.

We needed someone expert with a panga (jungle knife) to help us get through the think vegetation. (I have a deep scar and damaged nerves in my right hand as evidence that I am not an expert – I am happy to delegate). One of field assistants Marius agreed to come along and help. Our botanist, Robert Barigyira was interested to come along too, as were two of our student volunteers Emmanuel and Leah (good to get an outing now and again to avoid getting bored and stale at the station, Leah is helping Robert and me sort out the Bwindi plant lists). Quite an expedition.

We moved down the valley slopes. We approached the plants choosing our path carefully and only having to cut occasionally. It was a bright hot day.

We arrived close by the plants looking for fruit. After rejecting the first three plants (no fruit) we were in luck.

The massive flower stem looked promising (see the wild banana flower (Ensete) pictures here, below, and in an earlier post). Marius climbed up and threw down a few fruits.

We waited as Robert sliced the fruits open revealing peachy coloured orange-pink flesh and

What did we find …

The tension builds,

And builds,

And builds,

… almost ready

Look!

Yes, yes! Dark hard pea-sized seeds. These plants are as wild as they come! It is confirmed.

We examined several. All were clearly wild plants.

The top of each of the many fruiting plants we subsequently saw all seemed broken down, with the leaves bent back. It seemed that something, perhaps baboons or civets, had been climbing over them. (Perhaps when we get some automatic camera traps this could be another minor mystery we could solve in our quest to expand human knowledge).

I tasted the pink flesh of the open fruit: dry and astringent just like a very unripe banana can be. Best left for the animals. I guess the ripe fruits may taste better but do not stay long on the plants.

We were doing this for fun. But we still collected a specimen for the ITFC herbarium (its not an easy thing to preserve). Anyway, that’s another plant for the Bwindi list: a new official and verified record.

There is a serious point here too: if such an obvious plant has been missed even when about one hundred of them grow near to our research station how many other unlisted or even unknown species might be lurking out there in the rugged forests of the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park? How about the other forests in the region? There may be still LOTS of plants and animals out there to discover.

Now we still have the mystery of why these wild banana plants are so localised. Why are they so rarely seen? Indeed, yes, we have many many more pressing funding and conservation issues to think about, and I wont be mentioning it in our next grant proposals, but I’ll still be mulling it over.