The expensive but very popular spice, Vanilla, is an orchid that needs help to reproduce in the countries that produce the most vanilla beans. A research project in Malaysia seeks a way to increase the vanilla orchid population by improving one of these techniques.
My original thought was to highlight the "second rank" status of vanilla as a spice: it is second in popularity and second in price. Read the article to learn which spices beat out vanilla in those categories.
Some of the "bookmark" sites I use do not have a category like "agriculture" or "botany" or even "unusual facts". For those sites, I recommend this article to travelers who might take a side trip in a tropical country to see the vanilla orchid under cultivation.