October 12, 2018
A SPINE-COVERED CRACKER CATERPILLAR
In the garden, about a month ago, a particularly eye-catching caterpillar turned up, shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181012cc.jpg
A close-up of the front end shows bulbous-tipped spines arising above the the head, simulating antennae tipped with eyes, and a crimson underbody, as seen at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181012cd.jpg
Such bright coloration must warn potential predators of the sharp, much-branched spines. But, what's the species?
In November of 2017, here at the rancho a caterpillar was found so formidably bristling with spines that its black-and-yellow-splotched body hardly could be seen. Volunteer identifier Bea in Ontario thought that it might be Automeris metzli, which you can compare with our present spiny critter at https://www.backyardnature.net/mexnat/automeri.htm
However, that species' spines display a different branching pattern, and the underbody isn't red. Once again it took Bea in Ontario to figure out that now we have something entirely different. It's the larva of the commonly occurring Guatemalan Cracker butterfly. Just this August we profiled one of those that had just emerged from its chrysalis. You can see that mint-condition cracker and the split-open exuvia from which it had just emerged at https://www.backyardnature.net/mexnat/cracker.htm
On that page you can see that the exuvia is so delicate looking that it's hard to imagine how it was formed by a caterpillar as spiny as what's in our pictures. However, on the cracker page, notice that the parts of the exuvia that formerly encased the antenna-like, foremost spines are bulbous-tipped, just like the spines.
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SILKY ANOLE FANNING HIS DEWLAP
On October 5, during my recent camping trip in Chiapas, southern Mexico, on the cement floor of a rest shelter along the fine walkway/bike-path extending from the town of Palenque to the Palenque ruins, in mid afternoon an anole turned up with a broken-off tail beginning to sprout a new one. The little lizard was so plain that I wasn't sure I could ever identify him with certainty -- until he fanned out his orange dewlap, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181012an.jpg
That's just like the dewlap on our frequently met Silky Anole, and that rest shelter was just the kind of place the species is known to frequent. Our Silky Anole page is at https://www.backyardnature.net/q/s-anole.htm
Each time we meet a Silky Anole he looks a little different. Gradually we're gathering a nice collection of his many disguises.
*****
A REALLY BIG GUANACASTE/ PIICH/ "EAR TREE"
On the first of this month, while camping in El Rosario National Park adjacent to Sayaxché in northern Guatemala's Petén department, one of the most imposing presences at the campground's edge was a gigantic tree, the trunk bottom of which is shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181012pi.jpg
The sign identifies the tree as the Guanacaste, which is one of many names the species goes by. It's Enterolobium cyclocarpum of the Bean Family, a tree commonly encountered from southern Mexico through most of Central America. In the Yucatan the Maya call it Piich, and the tourists know it as the Ear Tree, because of its big, ear-shaped, legume-type fruits. Our page showing various of the tree's appearances is at https://www.backyardnature.net/mexnat/piich.htm
In the current picture, the trunk's massiveness can be judged from the husk-covered coconut lying beside the sign.
In the Yucatan, where usually the soil is very thin to nonexistent atop the limestone, mature Guanacastes/Piich/Ear-Trees often send thick, long, only half-buried roots snaking across the ground. I'd assumed that this was because of the thin soil. However, this tree in El Rosario seemed to grow in reasonably deep soil, yet it also produced long, snaking roots, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181012pj.jpg
Such roots help the big tree stand upright. Often the species's crown rises well above the general forest canopy, exposing itself to hard winds, so such a broad base is necessary.
Once back at Hacienda Chichen beside Chichén Itzá ruins in the Yucatan, a German tour leader came to me saying that she planned to return later with a group of people wanting to absorb the Earth's healing energy in a sacred place like Chichén Itzá. Could I suggest a specific spot where the Earth's energy was likely to be concentrating? I took her to a big "Ear Tree" nearby, where the roots radiated out in all directions as in the above picture. The tour leader couldn't have been happier with the spot.
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COROZO OR COHUNE PALMS
This October 1 when I was in El Rosario National Park in northern Guatemala's Petén department, the Corozo or Cohune Palm, ATTALEA COHUNE, was the most frequently occurring, characteristic tree of the park's old-growth forest. The species occurs in rainforests and borderline rainforests from southern Mexico south throughout Central America into South America. It's too arid in the Yucatan for them, though.
El Rosario's forest grew tall and dense, so the excellent nature trail I hiked lay deep in shade. There, the main view I had of Corozos was of fronds of young ones not yet producing noticeable stems, as seen at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181012at.jpg
Sometimes older trees grew at a bend in the trail, enabling a view of the tree's attractive form, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181012au.jpg
When an area is being deforested, often a few Corozos are left standing, presumably to provide shade for cattle, but also because the species is so handsome. What's especially appealing about them aesthetically is that the long fronds go limp toward their tips, nodding gracefully. In the forest, these features don't show up so well. Lone-standing mature trees look like giant feather-dusters with their handles stuck into the ground.
Corozos are big palms, eventually reaching over 20m (65ft) high. The fronds themselves can be enormous, attaining 10m or so, (33ft). A lower frond of one forest tree had broken near its base, providing an unusual view of a fully extended leaf, shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181012ax.jpg
Corozos produce large clusters of hen-egg-sized "nuts" such as those shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181012av.jpg
Often the ground below a mature Corozo is abundantly covered with nuts and if a little sunlight penetrates to that level a dense growth of seedlings results, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181012aw.jpg
In the shadowy bottom of that image you can see many Corozo nuts that haven't germinated. And the nuts, though hard to crack, are tasty, both raw or cooked, tasting something like coconut. A non-drying cooking oil can be extracted from them. Also, the trees' very young shoots can be cooked as a vegetable, and the palms' hearts are considered delicious, and can be eaten raw, though of course taking the heart kills the tree.
The leaves are used for thatching. In fact, the roof of the shelter in which my tent was set up in the park's campground was thatched with Corozo frond, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181012ay.jpg
In some place people weave large mats, or hats, with the fronds. The tree's much-branched flowering structure, or inflorescence, is used as a broom, and the trunk's wood is durable and strong enough for construction purposes.
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TEAK PLANTATIONS IN SOUTHERN MEXICO
On October 3rd as a van carried me from El Ciebo, Tabasco to Palenque, Chiapas, in southern Mexico, fair-sized tree plantations appeared along the road in many places, and I couldn't identify what was being grown. Later that day as I hiked the several-kilometer-long bike-path/walkway between the town of Palenque and Palenque ruins, the same tree species turned up spottily planted along the route. You can see the tree's distinctive large, rounded leaves and big, diffuse, panicle-type flowering heads, or inflorescences, bearing many tiny flowers, at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181012tk.jpg
On the stems, leaves arose opposite one another, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181012tl.jpg
All these details were noted high in the trees, well beyond my reach. However, the telephoto lens revealed that the stems were four-angled, or squared, with furrows along at least some of the stem sides, seen at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181012tq.jpg
Usually plant identification is most dependent on the appearance of flowers and fruits. This tree's inflorescences were doing something interesting, shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181012tm.jpg
In all the inflorescences, the vast majority of flowers had fallen off without producing fruits. In the picture, a single spherical fruiting structure is shown, but in other inflorescences sometimes two, three or more were observed. I call them fruiting structures because the yellowish-green, spherical item in the above picture seems to be doing something surprising for a fruit. Once again the telephoto lens helped out, with the image seen at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181012tn.jpg
The spherical item seems to be a kind of bladder so thin that light filters through it. Note the bladder's opening at a point opposite its attachment to the main inflorescence axis. It took awhile to find one of these bladdery objects on the ground, apparently still immature, maybe knocked there by a squirrel or the wind. Opening up the bladder of a fallen one revealed the hard, spherical, very hairy immature fruit shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181012to.jpg
Cutting across the fruit revealed a very hard seed, and showed how thick and dense the furry covering was, seen at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181012tp.jpg
It looks like we may actually have two seeds there, but I couldn't pry them apart with my thumbnail.
So, these are interesting, sometimes unusual, details, but even still I couldn't even imagine which plant family the tree might belong to. It wasn't until I got onto the Internet and "did the botany" with some technical keys that the family affiliation revealed itself, and it was a shocker. This large tree, apparently being grown as a tropical hardwood for its wood, is a member of the Mint Family, the Lamiaceae.
What's so mind-boggling is that we all know that members of the Mint Family normally are small, pungent herbs, that a good field mark for the family is that its fruits usually break apart into four "nutlets," the inflorescences aren't so huge, and they don't bear one or a few fuzzy fruits inside papery bladders. At first glimpse, the only thing about this tree reminiscent of the Mint Family is its squared stems bearing opposite leaves. Whatever the case, realizing that we had a large, plantation tree that was a member of the Mint Family, it was easy to figure out the species.
This is TECTONA GRANDIS, the Teak tree, the same Teak people are talking about when referring to Teak plantations in southeastern Asia,.
Teak, which can grow to 30m high (98ft), is grown for its wood, which is described as particularly durable and water resistant. Often it's used for boat building, exterior construction, furniture, carving, furniture, and many other purposes. Teak wood is said to smell like leather when it's freshly milled. Behind both the wood's water resistance and odor are its natural oils, which also provide resistance to termites and other wood-destroying invertebrates, and fungal diseases.
The wood's high value has caused the same situation we see with Oil Palms: Throughout the world's tropics, much old-growth tropical forest has been cleared to make room for Teak. At least a fair part of the land where I saw Mexico's Teak plantations seems to have been ranchland earlier, so maybe the problem with clearing old-growth forest isn't as important here. In Equatorial Africa Teak was planted widely during the Colonial era, and now that valuable timber, along with oil reserves, are at the heart of the current South Sudanese conflict. Whenever large amounts of money are involved, it seems that there's trouble, even when it's over an interesting member of the Mint Family.
So, how can Tectona grandis be a member of the Mint Family? The bladder turns out to be the original flower's tiny calyx very much expanded. In the Mint Family's skullcaps, genus Scutellaria, the calyx develops a substantial crest-like projection on the back, and in the Shell-Flower, Molucella laevis, the "shell" part is the flower's much expanded, shell-like calyx, so there's no reason why Teak calyxes shouldn't enlarge to form bladders around their fruits. Also I read that the tiny flowers bear five or six stamens extending well beyond the corollas, which is mint-like. But, what about those four nutlets we expect Mint-Family fruits to divide into?
My old Bailey's Manual of Cultivated Plants doesn't seem to think that the Teak's single, fuzzy drupes qualify for the Mint Family, but nowadays experts appear to believe that they do. The Teak flowers' ovaries are four-celled, with one ovule in each cell, perfectly correct for the Mint Family, so I'm guessing that most ovules succumb to natural abortion, leading to what's seen in our pictures.
What a pleasure meeting this famous, nonconformist member of the Mint Family, and what a surprise to find it being planted in Mexico.
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LAND, WATER, JUSTICE
ADO bus stations provide wifi connections in their lobbies, so on my recent trip to Guatemala I browsed the Internet while waiting for the bus south. I paid attention when a recent article in the UK's The Guardian newspaper turned up entitled "How Guatemala is sliding into chaos in the fight for land and water."
So far this year 18 Guatemalan activists have been killed, targeted for opposing evictions, logging and mining. The Guardian reports that a high-level, UN-backed mission to Guatemala suggests that the killings probably have been orchestrated by powerful political and financial interests with links to the drug trade and military. Last year saw 197 killings of environmental activists worldwide, the most dangerous countries being Brazil and the Philippines, with Guatemala now also one of the most dangerous.
The Guatemalan people have had it hard for a long time. In 1954 the US's CIA deposed democratically elected leftwing president Jacobo Árbenz on behalf of the United Fruit Company. Rebellion followed and in 1960 a 36-year-long civil war began, eventually resulting in about 200,000 largely indigenous people killed by the military, supported by the US, and hundreds of thousands of people emigrating to the US. Today 2.5% of Guatemala's landholdings occupy more than 65% of the land. Economic measures forced on Guatemala by the US and global bodies have further opened the country to foreign-backed mining, hydro dams that flood large areas, and various extractive industries, making the violence and inequality worse. Huge palm oil and sugarcane developments occupy much of the land.
So, when passing through Guatemala's northern department of the Petén and seeing how the landscape had been been completely deforested since my last visit there in 1975 or thereabouts, and that the land now was populated by a lot of very poor indigenous people, I saw things through the filter of the above information. I thought a lot about the situation, and am still stunned by what I saw.
In recent years my reading has focused more and more on human history. It's a lot like ecology, in that once it's understood that certain patterns appear again and again, in different times and contexts, when those patterns begin forming again, a good guess can be made as to how things probably will turn out.
The pattern of masses of people being abused by a few rich, powerful people is one of the most commonly occurring throughout human history. An interesting features of this pattern is that often members of the oppressed and abused rally behind the very ones taking advantage of them. Look how even still certain Europeans admire, even revere, their royal families. Look at Putin's high ratings in Russia. Look who most supports Trump and his rich cohorts in the US.
My reading of history is that sometimes the very rich and powerful get away with their plundering, sometimes they don't. In general, the less informed the abused masses are, the more likely their overlords will keep growing even richer, more powerful, and more abusive.
I'd like to say that my understanding of history and ecology is that eventually things evolve into a "more humane" state and that justice is done, but I just don't see that. My best reading of both history and ecology is that the powerful usually win. However, information -- and the art of distorting information -- are important forms of power.
Something else that history and ecology teach is that no one really has any "right" to anything -- including the right to live with dignity, to live in peace, to be treated with justice, and to have access to drinkable water, breathable air, and such.
My reading of both history and ecology is that, generally, individuals and communities gain dignity, peace and justice, and retain access to needed natural resources, only when -- at some point in their history -- they fight for those things, and win.
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Best wishes to all Newsletter readers,
Jim
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