A Neotropical Savanna

Two blog carnivals about plants are well worth reading this month: Festival of the Trees celebrates flowering and blossoming this season at Orchards Forever, and Berry Go Round #16 features mutualism, evolution and other interesting plant posts at Quiche Moraine.

While the a broad swath of the US experiences storms and flash flooding, the dry season still has a firm grip on our part of Panama. We now have a weather report for April 2009 based on data from our relatively new weather station, put into some context by looking at the 16-year rainfall record of Ricardo Espinosa from Potrerillos Arriba.

This morning as I was checking to see whether the sandpaper plant fruit had ripened, I turned around and met, to my astonishment, this sight:

I thought at first the small tree (in the Fabaceae family, Mimosa subfamily, but not yet identified) had suddenly developed thorns. A closer look, though, showed this collection of insects:

Some quick research at What’s that Bug suggested that this insect is a “thorn treehopper,” possibly Umbonia crassicornis or Umbonia spinosa. After piecing together the information from various sources, I gather that these insects pierce the plant stem to eat sap and also to lay their eggs in the plant tissue. Aggregations are usually of females guarding the eggs of their young. This activity does weaken the branches of the trees, but little other damage is done, according to what I have read so far.

Sorry, Umbonias, after the recent plague of beetles, we were quick on the draw with a pyrethrin-derivative spray. Next time we’ll watch a little longer and see what happens.

As you might imagine, weather information is pretty limited here. The closest official weather station to us is in David, the third largest city in Panama. It is near the coast, with a wide mangrove area between the city and the Pacific Ocean. Conditions there are rather different from what they are here on the Pacific Slope of Volcan Baru at 750 m (2,640 ft).

In January we set up a WeatherHawk station on our site, and after running it for some time, I feel it’s fair to go public with the data. The website is Potrerillos Arriba Weather, and current weather conditions are shown at Today’s Weather.

As of today we began broadcasting to Weather Underground, as well. The weather widget in the right-hand column points to our data. In addition, for this special announcement, I decided to include the gaudiest weather icon I could find, just for this particular post.

Enjoy!

PS – I forgot. This post is actually not an April Fools’ Day joke, though you might think so, since that’s about the only thing going around today.

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.

Read more »