A Neotropical Savanna

I’ve put together an index of the plant families featured so far on A Neotropical Savanna. It’s more than a simple index, though. It is annotated with description, identification features, and examples for each family. I put this together for my own use, but I’m drawing it to your attention in case you may find some value in it.

The main resources I used for the descriptions are wikipedia and a remarkable web site of the flora and fauna of the West Indies, which is called “Father Sanchez’s Web Site of West Indian Natural History” and which uses the domain name kingsnake.com.

The main resource I used for brief identification features was a book by Alwyn Gentry which is cited on the references page of this site.

The examples are given from my experience and this blog.

If you choose to take a look at the index and notice any errors, do leave a comment to let me know. I’d greatly appreciate it.

This vine belongs to the plant family Malpighiaceae, which is the family of the nance, a favorite fruit tree here in Panama. Because the family is represented only in the tropics and subtropics, I want to spend a little time comparing the parts of the nance plant with this vine, thereby looking closely at some of the family’s characteristics.

First, though, about that awkward family name – Malpighiaceae. I’ve heard botanists shorten it to something that sounds like “Malpiggy,” which I suppose is correct enough for pronunciation, but which sounds, in English, unjust to the Italian scientist for whom the family was named: Marcello Malpighi, a 17th century anatomist. We humans have a Malpighi skin layer, and we have Malpighian corpuscles in our kidneys and spleen. So why is a plant family named for him? Because he also looked at “plant anatomy” under the microscope and wrote a book about what he saw – the Anatomia Plantarum.

One plant feature he must have described in some detail are plant hairs that are attached to a plant by the middle of the hair, not at either end. There’s a sketch at Plant Families of the Dominican Republic, a site, by the way, that has an excellent description of the Malpighiaceae family.

The sketch shows the characteristic clawed petals of the flower on the left, the Malpighian Hairs at the top right, and the winged fruit, like the maple wing, at the lower right. It’s worth taking a closer look at the vine flower and the nance flower to see these details.

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