A Neotropical Savanna

Welcome to the 15th edition of Berry Go Round, a blog carnival about plants. This edition covers posts that were published in March 2009, spring(ish) time in the Northern Hemisphere, but not all posts, in fact very few, were about Spring. Let’s start with the ones that were.

Spring is Here

The signs of spring differ in different parts of the country as well as different parts of the world, of course. In Indiania in early March, Skunk Cabbage burst through the ground and was captured by Get Your Botany On! in Araceae: Symplocarpus foetidus.

In Texas, a sign of spring was the appearance of yellow composites along the side of the road. Rick Hammer at Flora of the Texas Rolling Plains shows his appreciation of the sight, as well as his understanding of the botany of it, in Engelmann’s Daisy in full bloom. (The key to the flowers of the Asteraceae family in the image at left is given here.)

Sally at Foothills Fancy has some sharp observations about what Colorado’s Crazy spring… is doing to the plant life. While you’re there, don’t miss the story of her rescue of a discarded catcus in Tree Cholla: Plant of the Week. To look at this cactus is to love it, well, at least you learn to love it through Sally’s excellent description of the plant and its history.

Ever wonder about those ferns on the forest floor after the snow melts, and how they’re already green? Emily looks into them in Evergreen Ferns at No Seeds…

Spring or Not

There’s something wonderful about seeing flowers bloom at the surface of a pond. Botanically inclined sorts may wonder whether these plants have special pollination strategies. Christopher Taylor of Catalogue of Organisms reports on these monocots in Flowers in the Water (Taxon of the Week: Hydrocharitaceae) and you may be surprised at what he reveals about their pollination.

People who are drawn to any aspect of the natural world rarely fit into a neat cubbyhole. Case in point – Ted MacRae, the beetle pro of Beetles in the Bush, knows more about plants than you can imagine. Just see how you fare with his Winter botany quiz #2 (with answers here).

Tropics and the Southern Hemisphere

Whether you’re interested in tropical botany or not, I highly recommend the post Costa Rica Part 3: Palms, Epiphytes, Figs and Wasps at Watching the World Wake Up. Watcher covers some of the most fascinating tropical nature observations in a way that links them all back to the temperate climate, specifically Utah. As you can tell from the title, there are several parts to the Costa Rican posts, all worth reading. Further, there’s a 6-part series entitled In Search of the Blue Piñon, a “Mexican-Tree-Adventure story.”

I’m bending one of the guidelines for Berry Go Round with this next recommendation. We don’t feature gardening posts on BGR – there are gardening carnivals for that purpose – but this post from a gardening blog, Yesterday Today and Tomorrow in My Garden, is about a native Australian tree with amazing, handkerchief-like blooms, the Blue Quandong, Elaecarpus angustifolius. It’s well worth the look.

Evolution and Extinction

It is still the 200th anniversary year of Darwin’s birth and I for one can’t get enough of the blog posts that continue to feature Darwin. Back in the 1970s I visited Darwin’s home in Downe, England, and walked along the path he strode while thinking over his work. So naturally I was really, really interested in the post on Darwin’s garden by Talking Plants. The post is about Darwin’s twin botanical loves, orchids and carnivorous plants, and how he studied them in his own garden. A slide show for the talk on the garden is posted here.

Laurent, too, has been taking a close look at orchids at his Seeds Aside blog. In the first one, Be orchids! he describes just how these orchids are able to self-pollinate when necessary and also how they prevent sunburn! This concept inevitably led to another post on sunburn protection in plants: More plant sunburns protection…. Then it was back to orchids with How to tell orchid males from females? which includes a neat movie of bees pollinating plants from the one genus of orchids that actually have male and female flowers.

Anyone reading Berry Go Round is fully aware that extinction rates in the natural world are appalling. Sarcozona at Gravity’s Rainbow has been running a series that highlights specific plants that have gone extinct. The series is “What We Killed This Thursday,” and if you can bear the sadness of it, it’s worth reading through the entire series. The most recent entry, Tout Disparaître, features the island of Mauritius, home of the dodo and other well-known extinctions.

Just recently I tried to wrap my mind around the concept of gnetophytes (for a post on an Ephedra frustillata specimen gathered by Darwin). Where do they fit in the evolutionary scheme of things, anyway? Within days, The Phytophactor spelled it all out at Gneater (neater) than all get out.

Research

Sometimes those memes that go around the blogging world seem like cute ways to waste time. But Sarcozona made the best of the one that arrived on her desk (What do you know?) and ran with 7 research papers – and one personal philosophy statement – that range from water transport in junipers and pines to fruit flies in the Sonoran Desert.

Perhaps it’s not legitimate to include a post on diatom research in a plant blog carnival – they’re single-celled algae and are grouped in a different kingdom from plants, after all – but I choose to cheat and to include them because 1) they contain chlorophyll, and 2) I liked Greg Landon‘s post Diatoms Large and Small. Just guessing, would you say that freshwater or marine diatoms would tend to be larger? Why? Oh, and what are diatoms, anyway? Greg’s post explains all.

Food
Rice is an incredibly important staple food for a large part of the world’s population (wikipedia), and learning where and how it was domesticated sheds light on the what kind of culture and society was needed to grow rice effectively. When and where was rice domesticated? at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog not only answers the question of its title, but also clearly explains the difference between “domestication” and “cultivation.” A distinction that was heretofore way too fuzzy in my own mind.
  

This concludes Berry Go Round #15. Berry Go Round #16 will be hosted by a relatively new blog Quiche Moraine. The blog, however, is maintained by some old pros, so expect an excellent issue of the carnival from them! If you would like to submit an item, you may use this convenient submission form.

The weevils that swarmed on the sandpaper plant when it was in bloom have been identified. I received this email from Dr. Henry Stockwell, who kindly performed the identification during his recent stay at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

The weevils that you sent me are named Solaria curtula, of the subfamily Baridinae. As I mentioned to you on the phone, the larvae have their development in stems near the ground of poor nutritional value and must make an effort to find pollen after they emerge from a brief pupal stage. This is one of the very few weevils that is found on a fern, Dicranopteris. This fern is very common and forms a mat of vegetative growth on bare red-clay slopes. The individual single plant may cover several square meters. It is the first plant to reclaim bare hill-sides after a land-slide. Can’t think of a plant that might be poorer nutritionally.

Someone had suggested to me that the weevils might be laying their eggs in the pistils of the sandpaper plant so that the larvae could develop along with the fruit. Dr. Stockwell said on the phone that such behavior would be extremely unlikely because of the known life cycle of this species, which he then described in the email, above.

I should also add that although I saw the weevils mating during their pollen-eating swarm, I did not see them laying eggs, nor did I see them spending much time near the greenish pistil of the flower, which is where they would have had to lay their eggs.

Thank you, Dr. Stockwell.

One of the more common trees in our area is this one, often called sangrillo in Panama. Sangrillo means “a little red” from sangre, for blood, and -illo giving it the diminutive form. But when you first see the tree you don’t see its little red blood. What you notice are the brown or light green undersides of the leaves and, most of the year, the globular buds at the ends of the branches.

When I first thought about identifying this tree, I zoomed in on those leaves. The color of their undersides reminded me of many of the Miconia leaves around here. At least one species in Panama is called dos caras – named for the “two faces” of the leaves.

But a quick look shows that the sangrillo (left image below) lacks the longitudinal veins of the Miconia (right image below).

      

Since those longitudinal veins are characteristic of the entire family to which Miconia belongs – the Melastomataceae – and the sangrillo doesn’t have them, then I thought I’d better start the identification from scratch.

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I have been going over the notes I made for the sandpaper plant that I watched bloom in January and February. It seems to me that are some astounding synchronies between flower “behavior” and insect behavior, so I’ve decided to summarize what I found.

There were two massive blooms, separated by a three-week period, and the sequence of events was the same each time. Here’s the chronology. All events – both flower development and insect activity – occurred about 30 minutes earlier in the day for the second bloom than for the first, so ranges of time are given.

Before sunrise – Flowers are just barely open and the stamens are barely exposed.

At sunrise - A few bees arrive.

Thirty minutes to an hour past sunrise – Flowers are fully open and the bees are swarming. (You may need to wait for the movie to load.)

The bees are collecting pollen and no doubt distributing it as well. The petals are as wide open as possible to attract the bees to the flowers, and the stamens (pollen-bearing male parts) and the pistil (female part leading to the ovary) are fully exposed to bee activity.

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