Just recently I have had the pleasure of meeting the world famous Botanist Sir Ghillean Prance. He is a very nice man and my Mom told me I should Interview him and write something up so I did.
Sir Ghillean Prance likes the Amazon region very much-especially the areas that are undiscovered. He has discovered about 450 plants from mainly the Amazon region and also has many named after him. He has not discovered any carnivorous plant but He has seen a plant in tropical Asia that is shaped like a pitcher and can eat frogs. He also has discovered beetles that help pollinate the Amazon water lily.
The Amazon water lily has a very interesting relationship with this beetle (and another type of beetle). When the flower of the water lily opens the beetle will go in attracted to fragrance and will stay inside for around 24 hours. At the end of that time it will come out covered in pollen and do the same to other water lily flowers cross pollinating them.
Sir Ghillean also likes to study the indigenous peoples of the Amazon because they live their lives totally based on plants. They make everything they need from plants.
Sir Ghillean loved plants when he was a boy. He would look plants up in a book to figure out what they were. He decided he wanted to be a botanist when he was 10 or 11.
He has not discovered any plants with medicinal uses but he does try to get plants used locally in the Amazon region for example: when the animami tribe was sick with malaria he helped teach them about what other tribes did with plants to help. So there you have Sir Ghillean Prance.
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