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Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter
Notes from a May 26, 2019 camping trip in El Rosario National Park, Petén Department, in northern GUATEMALA
"SHINGLE PLANT" CLIMBING TREE TRUNKS
In the deeply shaded understory of older, wetter forests bordering on rainforest conditions, in lowland southern Mexico, Belize and northern Guatemala, for decades I've seen the tree-climbing vine shown below -- this in northern Guatemala's El Rosario National Park on the east side of Sayaxché -- and I never could figure out know what it was.
On the Internet, recently I found Michael Madison's 1977 work A Revision of Monstera (Araceae). Monsteras are vines that climb trees, so this week when I tried once again to identify what's shown in the picture, thinking it might be a Monstera, I dove into Madison's Revision. And it was indeed a Monstera, MONSTERA TUBERCULATA var. TUBERCULATA.
More precisely, it was the immature vine form of Monstera tuberculata just starting out life climbing a tree trunk, later to develop into a much more robust-looking, dangling vine high in the tree, with different looking leaves, and bearing fruiting structures. Several Monstera species produce such trunk-climbing vines bearing flattish leaves mostly or entirely covering the vine stem, and horticulturists, who sometimes grow this juvenile form in pots, call all such forms "shingle plants," irregardless of the species.
Mature Monstera tuberculata climb high into trees, then dangle long stems with oval leaves 18cm long (7inches), and produce Jack-in-the-pulpit-like flowering structures consisting of a spathe (Jack's pulpit) about 9cm across and long (3½inches), and flowering spadix (Jack himself) about half the spathe's length. Of the 22 or so Monstera species, only Monstera tuberculata produces a dangling flowering body, instead of an erect one.
Madison divides the species Monstera tuberculata into two varieties. Ours, Monstera tuberculata var. tuberculata, is endemic only to southern Mexico, Belize and northern Guatemala. The variety brevinodum occurs only in Costa Rica. Thus there are two widely separated populations, despite the fact that before recent clearing of forests a continuous wet tropical forest connected the two populations along the Atlantic coast. Madison mentions the theory that the species' absence between Guatemala and Costa Rica may represent an extermination of the species during periods of drier climate during the Pleistocene, or "Ice Age."
So, this strange little plant climbing tree trunks in certain old, wet forests is an interesting one, one that starts out life looking one way, but then later changes its appearance and manner of living, and even has a story to tell about hard times during the Ice Age.