A Neotropical Savanna

Back in October, I started looking at some precipitation data for our region and wondered whether we were beginning to see any effects of the current El Niño, which is predicted to continue through May 2007. Since I’m so new to the region, I needed to learn the normal patterns before I could understand how they might be affected by an El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event.

My first questions were: 1) where do our rains come from, and 2) why do we have a wet season and a dry season in Panama? For questions like this, I step back as far as possible to get an overview. In this case, I started with the Sun and the Earth.

[For a professional illustration, click here.]

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Blooming now at the edge of a “tangled bank” of growth alongside our seasonal stream is an Aphelandra species, relative to the zebra plant, A. squarrosa.

It is a shrub with a candle-like flower-head or inflorescence. You can see in the next image its green bracts, which are tinged with yellow and orange, and its tubular, fuzzy, scarlet flowers.

The name, Aphelandra, comes from the Greek apheles, meaning simple, and andra, meaning male. The name could mean “sleek anther,” but it refers to the fact that the anther (the male, pollen-producing portion of the flower) consists of a single cell.

I’ll get back to that anther in a moment. Read more »

We’ve been without internet since last Friday, but the banana stalk is still changing. For those who do not wish to go through all 60 images that I now have at Flickr on banana development, I’ve put together a set of “Banana development highlights” consisting of only 11 images.

You can find it here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ntsavanna/

How do you tell the difference between a plantain and a banana?

It’s pretty straightforward when you walk into a fruit and vegetable stand and see large, green plantains next to smaller, yellow bananas.

Plantains are starchy and are cooked like starches. Bananas can be cooked, too, but the bananas we know from temperate climates are “dessert” bananas and usually are eaten raw.

But it’s not so easy to tell them apart when you look at two adjacent, growing plants, one plantain, the other banana.
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