Rafflesia Flower - Rafflesia lagascae

This was a major find for me, first time to see a Rafflesia Flower in Philippines and in a location that has no records of Rafflesia sighting before. The guide that went with us was not familiar with them nor does he has any interest in them and the significance (guide was just to accompany hikers to prevent getting lost).

After we posted pictures of this, we were contacted by local Rafflesia experts who wanted to know the exact location so that they can go and look for it to verify its species. They went to the place but couldn't find it and continue going there and checking out the vicinity area and eventually found it again, I think about 1.5 years later.

Rafflesia lagascae is the most widespread Rafflesia to be found in Philippines, they were originally thought to be the same as Rafflesia manillana, however, the type specimen of R.manillana was from Samar Island, further south of Luzon :

http://parasiticplants.siu.edu/Rafflesiaceae/Raff.lagascae.page.html

Philippines now boast the record of the most number of species of Rafflesia in the world.

Rafflesia are parasitic flower, without leafs, stem or true roots. The only part of them that is visible is the 5-petaled flower. Most Rafflesia has pungent smell of rotting flesh to attracts insects but strangely, this one doesn't smell too bad. It is also a very small sized, just around 20 cm in diameter compared to the much larger Rafflesia of up to 1 meter diameter.