Artwork for podcast Bad at Goodbyes
Belin Sweet Pea
Episode 34 • 14th May 2025 • Bad at Goodbyes • Joshua Dumas
00:00:00 00:31:03

Share Episode

Shownotes

Belin Sweet Pea :: Lathyrus belinensis

Bad at Goodbyes :: Episode 034

On today’s show we learn about the Belin Sweet Pea, a critically endangered flowering legume plant native to the Middle East, specifically the Antalya province, in southern Turkey.

  • (00:05) Intro
  • (02:05) Species Information
  • (17:02) Citations
  • (18:46) Music
  • (28:48) Pledge

Research for today’s show was compiled from:



Please find us on the web at Bad at Goodbyes and on instagram. Please subscribe and rate/review Bad at Goodbyes wherever you listen to podcasts. Please help spread the word about the show and about the species we feature. Please take care of each other, and all of our fellow travelers.


A note on accuracy: I strive for it! These episodes are well-researched and built from scholarly sources, hoping to provide an informed and accurate portrait of these species. That said, I’m an ambient musician! I am not an academic and have limited scientific background. I may get things wrong! If you are using this podcast for scholarship of any kind, please see the cited sources and double-check all information.

Transcripts

Intro:

Welcome to Bad at Goodbyes.

On today’s show we consider the Belin Sweet Pea

Species Information:

The Belin Sweet Pea is a critically endangered flowering legume plant native to the Middle East, specifically the Antalya province, in southern Turkey.

The Belin Sweet Pea has a climbing growth form, meaning the plant's stems ascend vertically by attaching to external supports (like other plants, rocks, walls, fences) rather than relying on their own structural rigidity to grow upright. The Belin Sweet Pea develops touch-sensitive, specialized leaf structures called tendrils which coil around other plant stems or objects in its habitat facilitating upward growth increasing access to sunlight, crucial for photosynthesis. From ground to full extension the Belin Sweet Pea generally reaches from 1-3 feet in total length.

Its flowers are striking and particularly gorgeous; they develop in a papilionate arrangement. Papilion is the french word for butterfly, and this flower form is so named as it does kind of resemble butterflies. The petals have a distinctive arrangement: there’s a large upper petal called the banner, two lateral petals called wings, and two fused lower petals form the keel. The banner petal in the Belin Sweet Pea grows large and upright with a yellow-ish color marked by reddish arched veins throughout. The wings, which provide a landing platform for pollinators, are bright yellow, and the keel is a paler yellow, a kind of hood, enclosing the flower's reproductive organs.

Individual flowers roughly measure three-quarters of an inch to one inch in length, have a bright sharp scent and bloom in the summer, roughly June to August.

Though my research did not turn up specific documentation, these floral adaptations suggest the Belin Sweet Pea is pollinated by bees attracted to its rich coloring and scent. Once pollinated, the flowers develop small green, uh, pea pods, this is a legume, a pea plant. The pods are generally less than an inch in length and a quarter inch wide, holding 2-3 seeds (the peas) and are indehiscent, meaning pods do not actively split open upon maturity to release seeds. Seeds are most likely distributed by barochory, that’s by gravity. The pods fall from the flowers and the seeds are released as the pod decays on the ground near the parent plant.

The seeds will remain dormant until the following spring. The Belin Sweet Pea is an annual, meaning it completes its entire life cycle within a single growing season. It sprouts, grows, flowers, produces seeds, and dies, all within one year.

Um, don’t eat these peas. My first thought, looking at the gorgeous flowers of the Belin Sweet Pea, and given its name a “sweet” pea, I assumed they would be delicious. But instead, the peas contain amino acids and aminonitriles that when consumed in abundance can cause a neurotoxic condition reaction resulting in muscle weakness, paralysis, weaken pulse, shallow breathing, and convulsions.

So again, do not eat Belin Sweet Peas.

The Belin Sweet Pea is native to southern Turkey in the Kumluca district of the Antalya province, near the village of Belen. Its entire known wild population is concentrated in a less than 1 square mile area, near the D400 expressway.

mestone hillsides, at roughly:

This is a shrubland of thin soils, populated by low growing vegetation, with open spaces of grasses marked by stands of small trees and areas of bare rugged rock.

Summers are hot and dry with highs averaging in the low 90s°F; winters are cooler and wet with lows in the upper 30s°F. The area receives a moderate amount of precipitation, roughly 50 inches per year with the majority of the rainfall in the winter months.

The Belin Sweet Pea shares its native habitat with:

Starred Agama, Stone Pine, Lycian Asparagus, Bay Lycian Salamander, Slender-stemmed Mullein, Taurus Ground Squirrel, Lycian Ironwort, Eastern Imperial Eagle, Lycian Blue Butterfly, Rockrose, Spear-leaved Sage Bush, Anatolian Lycian Salamander, Scarlet Corn Poppy, Turkish Pine, Eurasian Lynx, Caracal, Bordered Bugloss, Lycian Stonecress, Krüper's Nuthatch, and many many more.

————

In the dream

To be a lightness on a hillside. To be soft and bright among the jagged stones. To be a flame in a graveyard. To be beautiful. To climb. To nurture small offerings coaxed from sunlight. To promise. To seed.

All of that, all of that,

And

To despair at the whim of giant machines.

In the dream

————

Historically the Belin Sweet Pea’s population was reduced by overgrazing domestic livestock, which so substantially depleted the area's vegetation that sometime in the 20th century sections of its habitat was replanted. But it was replanted with coniferous trees whose tall growth form blocked the necessary light needed for the Belin Pea’s survival.

s only recently described, in:

In the time since the late:

Neither the Belin Sweet Pea nor its habitat is legally protected. Its seeds have been collected and are conserved off-site at the Aegean Agricultural Research Institute in Menemen, Turkey, at the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas in Beirut, Lebanon, and at the Millennium Seed Bank Project at the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in the UK.

Lastly, and kind of heartbreaking, there are living specimens conserved in three international botanic gardens, but their locations are not publicly disclosed for threat of human poaching.

ed on the IUCN Red List since:

ounts estimate that less than:

Citations:

Information for today’s show about the Belin Sweet Pea was compiled from:

ir Yildirim, and Tolga Cetin.:

April:

(:

.:

(:

Plant Heritage. June:

.:

. Aydin-Kandemir F, Demir A (:

Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lathyrus_belinensis

Music:

Pledge:

I honor the lifeforce of the Belin Sweet Pea. I will commit its name to my record. I am grateful to have shared time on our planet with this being. I lament the ways in which I and my species have harmed and diminished this species. I grieve.

And so, in the name of the Belin Sweet Pea I pledge to reduce my consumption. And my carbon footprint. And curb my wastefulness. I pledge to acknowledge and attempt to address the costs of my actions and inactions. And I pledge to resist the harm of plant and animal kin and their habitat, by individuals, corporations, and governments.

I pledge my song to the witness and memory of all life, to a broad celebration of biodiversity, and to the total liberation of all beings.

Video

More from YouTube