November 9, 2018
A COLLARD DWARF GECKO
A month ago, on October 2 when I was camping on the eastern side of the town of Sayaxché, in Rosario National Park in northern Guatemala's Petén district, the daily afternoon downpour was just beginning as I got out of the tent to move it more toward the thatch-roofed shelter's center. At that moment a tiny lizard ran from beneath the tent's edge, across the concrete floor. I had just enough time to snap a picture when he paused a moment before plunging over the edge into a crack in the shelter's foundation. You can see him at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181109gk.jpg
He was small, about the length of my small finger. I didn't even know he bore those interesting black-edged white blotches until the photo appeared on the laptop's screen. With such unusual field marks, he was easy to identify the little fellow as the Collared Dwarf Gecko, SPHAERODACTYLUS GLAUCUS, distributed from southern Mexico south to Honduras. This is a small distribution area, and not much information is available about the species on the Internet, so I'm glad to document that they like to snuggle under tent edges in camping shelters.
In Amphibians and Reptiles of Northern Guatemala, the Yucatán and Belize. Jonathan Campbell, who uses the common name Spotted Bark Gecko, tells us that in natural situations the species is found under loose bark, among epiphytes growing in trees, and in crevices in vertical rocky outcroppings. The shelter's foundation crack was close enough to the latter environment. I read elsewhere that in houses, where it may camp in thatch roofing, sometimes it's both prey and competition for the Common House Gecko.
Campbell reports it as present in the northern Yucatan Peninsula, but I've never seen it there. All my abodes in the Yucatan have been occupied by noisy House Geckos, so maybe they eat any Collard Dwarf that comes around.
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VATAIREA TREE
It's a special pleasure to meet a kind of tree I've never seen or even heard of, and that happened last October 2 when I was camping in Rosario National Park in northern Guatemala's Petén district, on the east side of the town of Sayaxché. Though the tree grew there naturally and was part of the surrounding forest, one in the campground was identified, making it easy for me. You can see the tree's trunk at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181109vt.jpg
The sign gives its Guatemalan Spanish names as Danto and Medallo, though I read that in other parts of its distribution area it's called Tinco, Amargoso, Amargo-Amargo, Arisauru, Yaksaru, Mora, Gele Kabbges and even other names, so it seems to be a species that has caught many peoples' attention. It's VATAIREA LUNDELLII, a member of the Bean Family, occurring from southeastern lowland Mexico south along the Atlantic side to Panama. The sign also says that its wood is used in general construction, which probably accounts for its many names.
The identification sign leaning against the trunk originally might have been planted beside a different tree, even a different species, so good leaf pictures were needed to confirm the ID on the Internet. However, this was a tall tree and all leaves were high above. The telephoto lens managed to pick out the ones shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181109vu.jpg
They're pinnately compound leaves, very commonly seen on members of the Bean Family, fairly similar to Pecan tree leaves up north. The night before the picture was taken, a storm had knocked some branches down, so a shot of a leaf on the ground matching what was above is at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181109vv.jpg
The leaflets' venation is fairly distinctive, the secondary veins almost forming right angles with the midribs, plus their undersurfaces look silvery, or "glaucous."
Not only is Vatairea lundellii a species much used for general construction, in the forest it often is noted as a dominant tree, partly because of its size, to about 130 feet (40m).
I looked for flowers and/or fruits, but I read that it flowers from March to May, and apparently by October the legumes already have fallen.
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ROOTSPINE PALM
A month ago, on October 2 when I was camping on the eastern side of the town of Sayaxché, in Rosario National Park in northern Guatemala's Petén district, I set my tent up beside the clump of fan-palms seen at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181109pm.jpg
The palms were neither flowering nor fruiting, but their fronds were so unusual that maybe I could identify the species solely on their appearance. You can see an important peculiarity of the fronds in a close-up of a frond blade's base, where it attaches to its petiole, at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181109pn.jpg
One curious feature is that the fronds are for the most part divided into many slender segments, but as the segments approach their points of attachment with the petiole they unite into a very few units-- five or so.
Another unusual fieldmark is that for a short distance the frond's petiole for a shorts distance continues as a kind of midrib into the blade body, with segments branching off its side. This petiole continuing as a midrib qualifies the palm as a "costapalmate" species, which the vast majority of palms are not.
These two features lead me to CRYOSOPHILA STAURACANTHA, sometimes known as the Rootspine Palm. It's endemic just to southeastern Mexico, Belize and Guatemala. Earlier the binomial was thought to be Cryosophila argentea, but the authoritative PalmPedia.Net page for the species regards that an outdated name, a synonym. The common English name of Rootspine relates to the palm's trunks being covered with spine-like modified roots that keep away animals.
The palm in our picture has no trunk, so it's a young one. On the Internet, trunkless Rootspines looking like ours can be found, as well as those with very well developed, tall, slender stems bearing formidable spines on their bases.
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TURMURIC FLOWERS
At https://www.backyardnature.net/mexnat/turmeric.htm you can see that Turmeric, a member of the Ginger Family, grows very well in the Yucatan's thin, calcareous, clay soil, producing prodigious harvests of spicy, orangish rhizomes. This week, for the first time in my two years of growing Turmeric, one and only one of my many plants turned up flowering, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181109tm.jpg
Toward the plant's base, note the white-topped, tufted thing. That's a flowering head, or inflorescence, and I don't know why its top leaves are white; maybe to make the inflorescence more visible to pollinators. However, the main leaves also are a bits chloritic, probably from sunburn, now that the dry season has begun and afternoon clouds have dispersed. A close-up of the inflorescence is shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181109tn.jpg
Most of the inflorescence is composed of reduced leaves called bracts -- a bract subtending each open flower. In the picture, a single corolla with a yellow lower lip snugly lies upon the curved bract below it. That flower is shown closer up at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181109to.jpg
The corolla is "irregular," meaning that its lobes are not all alike. The top lobes curve into a kind of hood, those at the bottom expand into a broad landing pad for pollinators. The flowers are similar to those of snapdragons in that sense, but otherwise are very different. A big difference is this blossom's two white "teeth" dangling from the blossom's top. If you bend back the corolla's top and bottom, the "teeth" appear as seen at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181109tp.jpg
The "teeth" are what there is of the flower's single fertile stamen, such lone stamens constituting a feature of blossoms of the Ginger Family. However, within the family the stamens' pollen-producing anthers vary greatly. The anther form seen here is peculiar to Turmeric.
In the above picture, on both sides of the single stamen, arise two white, petal-like items, which are modified, sterile stamens called staminodes. Such petal-like staminodes are absent from flower of the closely related Ginger plant grown for its much-appreciated spicy rhizomes.
Otherwise, Turmeric flowers follow the usual pattern, as you can see from an entire one pulled from its inflorescence at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181109tq.jpg
At the picture's lower left, the white calyx is perfectly average. The tubular, yellow corolla is of a usual kind, too. It's just with the lonely stamen with its weird anther, guarded by the two white staminodes that things get strange.
Why did this particular plant flower while none of the dozens of others did? Surely it's because, of all my Turmeric plants, only this one came up from a rhizome not purposefully planted and taken care of. Apparently when I was planting the others this plant's rhizome fell onto hard-packed soil I'd not broken up, and later did not water or fertilize. The biggest mystery is why this flowering plant also is considerably larger than those planted at the same time, and which I've taken care of. Genetically they're all the same, all clones from the same massive rhizome-stock.
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A NEW 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 at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181109ae.jpg
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 https://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 at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181109af.jpg
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.
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BONELLIA BUSH WITH RIPE FRUITS
In September we looked at a Bonellia Bush's immature, green, lemon-like fruits. On its page, we emphasize the fruits' very unusual placentation -- the manner in whcih the developing seeds attach to the surrounding fruit. The page is at https://www.backyardnature.net/mexnat/bonellia.htm
Back then I didn't wait until a fruit was ripe because it they looked like something foraging animals might eat before they got ripe. However, this week the same bush profiled earlier bore fully mature, bright yellow fruits, and I can't explain why animals haven't taken them. Whatever the case, when one of the lemon-like fruits was broken open, its dark brown seeds encrusting a large ball of freestanding, waxy substance seemed like something worth showing. You can see at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181109bn.jpg
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RISING AND FALLING
I'm reading Glimpses of World History, by Jawaharlal Nehru, written in the early 1930s when he was in prison for agitating for India's independence from the United Kingdom. In 1947 he became India's first Prime Minister. The book consists of letters to his teenage daughter, Indira Gandhi, who later also became Prime Minister.
Early in the book Nehru emphasizes that throughout human history many great civilizations have risen and fallen. He recalls the Median, the Babylonian, the Persian, the Greek, and Roman, as well as the ancient great empires and societies of China and India, and others. Great civilizations and empires seem inevitably to collapse for two main reasons.
First, citizens of dominant societies grow soft, lazy and unwilling to make personal sacrifices for the common good, at which point another set of people hungry for various combinations of plunder, fame and power replace them. A second cause for collapsing civilizations is the universal fact that "It's easier to destroy than to build." Throughout history much less developed but more violent and aggressive groups have replaced larger and more advanced ones for this reason.
Why should reality be structured so that not only great civilizations and empires inevitably fall, but also humanity's main belief systems and manners of behaving, and all the Earth's ecosystems, and us individual living things as well... all eventually being replaced, the replacement process often accompanied by all kinds of hurt?
The only answer I can think of is, that the Universal Creative Impulse is obsessed with evolving things, and evolution is by definition one thing replacing another -- things "rising" and things "falling." And of course lots of things that have risen don't want to be replaced, so plenty of violence and hurt feelings are part of the equation.
Thinking like this, if only to keep from getting depressed, it's good to remember that we humans can manage our minds and feelings in ways that -- as long as there's clean air, water, nourishing food and adequate shelter -- we can be happy, even joyous, though we wear rags and be outcasts.
Along with the Creator's passion for evolution, there seems to be another passion for spawning mentalities able to transcend the realities of the physical Universe. Throughout human history there have been mystics and prophets who radiated peace and joy no matter what misfortunes their bodies endured. Mystics and prophets become who they are by using their minds in a certain way.
Exploring, discovering, and managing our own minds is possible for all of us. Certain gurus can teach us techniques for doing it, but in my experience the forests and fields are the best gurus. Intimacy with Nature is the main path by which the human spirit can rise above the disharmony and misery attending a Universe of inescapable, unending cycles of all kinds of rising and falling.
Nature teaches without words, but you must be receptive, so not hurting or being distracted. Silently you experience, you feel, you know, and then you are happy.
Simple as that, even in a world busy with risings and fallings.
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Best wishes to all Newsletter readers,
Jim
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