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Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter
from the November 9, 2018 Newsletter with notes from a camping trip into northern Guatemala's Petén department
A TERRESTIAL AECHMEA BROMELIAD
A month ago, on October 1 as I was walking into the campground of Rosario National Park in northern Guatemala's Petén district, on the eastern side of the town of Sayaxché, certain plants along the road were accompanied by identification signs. Most of the plants were common and well known, but an agave-like plant caught my attention, seen below:
The sign gives its local common name as Pita Floja, with its binomial as AECHMEA MAGDALENAE. Also it says that the plant's fibers are used for making fishing poles, hats, hammocks and rope. "Fishing poles" doesn't make sense. Probably someone said "fishing line" to the sign painter, who wasn't paying much attention, or thinking at all about the sense of what he was writing, and so "cañas de pescar got written.
What caught my attention was that in the Yucatan we have a species of the same genus, Aechmea bracteata, that commonly and spectacularly grows on trees, as you can see on our Aechmea bracteata page at www.backyardnature.net/yucatan/aechmea.htm
On that page you can see that the spines on leaves of Aechmea bracteata arise fairly close together. The spines on our Guatemalan Aechmea magdalenae are farther apart and not so large, as you can see below:
The genus Aechmea to which these plants belong resides in the almost completely tropical American Pineapple/ Bromelia Family, the Bromeliaceae. In that family the vast majority of species are epiphytic, growing on trees, the way Aechmea bracteata does on its page. I was surprised seeing this Guatemalan Aechmea planted on the ground.
It turns out that our Guatemalan Aechmea magdalenae is an exception to the epiphyte rule, along with the Pineapple. Though traditionally planted for its fibers, in Nature it occurs uncommonly in moist to swampy woods, from southern Mexico south to northern South America. No plant was flowering or fruiting during this visit.