What exactly is an 'Alocasia pseudosanderiana'? Spoiler alert: I don't f***ing know

 Whilst taking a stroll around the church grounds of San Jose in Nueva Ecija one early September morning, I came across this Alocasia whose identity is still steeped in a shitload of question marks. Consider:

1. No one really knows where it originally came from. 

Well, probably from the Philippines. However, Dr. Lanie Medecilo did not include this plant in her studies on Philippine alocasias a few years ago. But in the same vein, it can be found growing semi-wild in some areas in the Philippines, while it has so far not been reported doing the same in neighboring regions.

2. No one knows what its exact identity is.

The name 'Alocasia pseudosanderiana' is a nomen nudum. In other words, it was established without following the rules of describing new plant species. As such, the name should not be used at all. But we do need something to refer this plant with, and 'Alocasia pseudosanderiana' is available despite its dubious merits.

But here is where it gets interesting. I once discussed this plant to Filipino aroid collector George Yao (Does Amorphophallus yaoi ring a bell to 'ya?) and he claimed that no one has ever seen it in fruit. Heck, I don't even remember seeing it in flower, let alone fruit. Apparently, this plant blooms so infrequently that observations seem (almost?) lacking. But why? Flowering and fruiting are very important components of every flowering plant because it ensures the continued survival of the species through dispersion. A. pseudosanderiana has been found on roadsides and waste places near human habitation, but never inside forested areas, as far as is known. This raises the likelihood then that these plants are cultigens and that it relies on anthropogenic activities to disperse. I once saw a small population of these plants within a quarry site where gravel and rocks are mined for construction use and landfills. Go figure: pieces of rhizomes and bulbils get loaded into dump trucks to be deposited somewhere else. Why expend energy flowering and fruiting when clueless humans are doing the dispersing for you? That might answer the 'why?' bit concerning its flowering and fruiting, but it raises a hairy question: if it is a cultigen, then what and where is the wild form? Two widely cultivated grasses, rice and corn, are cultigens. If and when humans decide to obliterate one another due to world order-changing reasons like territorial disputes, ideology, football, and whether pineapples should finally be recognized as canon in the world of pizzas, then rice and corn will vanish too within a few years because they have relied on their continued existence and dispersal by grain-famished humans. But not their wild counterparts. And we do know what and where the original forms of rice and corn were. However, we do not know if there is a truly wild form of A. pseudosanderiana. No, it cannot be A. sanderiana. A. sanderiana has fewer primary veins, is incapable of producing lots of leaves, and does not clump like A. pseudosanderiana does. In fact, except for the superficially similar sinuate leaf margins, I can't see any trait that would point to an A. sanderiana ancestry to the plant in question. Or maybe it's a natural/man-made hybrid of some distant hybridizing event. But then, what were the parents and why are there no records of such miscegenation if some bored horticulturists were involved? It would seem that for every possible answer, a new question inevitably crops up. 

I must admit that I cannot answer these sticky questions alone. So if you can advance at least a few ideas, then don't keep it to yourself. Write it down and comment, dammit!