December 14, 2018

BRONZE-BACKED PARROT SNAKE UP CLOSE
Biking from Ek Balam back to the rancho, a slender, meter-long (3.3ft) snake rested unmoving in the middle of the road. He didn't respond when I nudged him, so he was roadkill, though few indications of that were apparent. He was as pretty one, but one we've already profiled, at https://www.backyardnature.net/yucatan/parrotsn.htm

He was the Bronze-backed Parrot Snake, which is fairly common in the Yucatan. I've encountered him several times, but always either I didn't have a camera or else the snakes slithered away before I could document their field marks. Now I could do that.

In snake identification, scale configuration, especially on the head, is of great importance, so first I got a good side view of the head, shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214ps.jpg

This species' eyes were large for the head size. Something else distinguishing this species from another of the same genus is that it has a "loreal scale." To find the loreal, locate the nostril at the head's front. Behind the nostril, toward the eye, there's the ±hexagonal "postnasal scale." The scale in front of the eye, toward the nose, is the "preocular scale." The loreal resides between the preocular and postnasal scales. Scales atop the head also are important, and you can see our snake's at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214pt.jpg

If you're fascinated by this scale business, you might enjoy our Snake Identification page, where head scales are identified, at https://www.backyardnature.net/snakidnt.htm

One good field mark our snake displays is that its nose is blunt, almost squared. However, more important is the number of rows of scales along the body. Bronze-backed Parrot Snakes, at the middle of their bodies, bear 15 rows of dorsal scales, or top scales. You can see that the dorsal scales bear slender but prominent ridges, or "keels," on a side view of our snake at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214pu.jpg

The white bottom scales, or "ventrals," lack keels. Those keels are a good field mark, and it's supposed that keels help the snake maintain hold on shrub and tree limbs they move through. Bronze-backed Parrot Snakes are arboreal, often seen climbing among bushes and other low vegetation, where its main food is frogs, though it's also been noted eating salamanders and lizards.

Bronze-backed Parrot Snakes are distributed from northern Mexico's Atlantic slope south to Costa Rica. Two subspecies are recognized. Here in the northern Yucatan we have a special Yucatan subspecies, Leptophis mexicanus ssp. yucatanensis.

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HARVESTING ROSELLE/JAMAICA CALYXES
At https://www.backyardnature.net/mexnat/jamaica.htm we look at the Roselle or Jamaica bush from which the very popular local herbal tea called Jamaica is brewed. In the US the tea is sold under the brand name Red Zinger. On our Roselle page we take a special look at the flowers' calyxes, which when plucked, dried, and added to hot water make the tea. This week we've harvested the flowers, removed the calyxes, and begun drying them.

When the dry season began a month or so ago, I began watering the plants regularly. However, soon the plants' lower leaves started drying up and falling off. I read that Roselles respond not to temperature changes and water availability, but rather to photoperiod, or the relative lengths of days and nights. In the Northern Hemisphere at this time of year the days are growing shorter, and at our latitude during early November Roselle decides to start dropping its leaves and put all its energy into enlarging and maturing its calyxes. By the first of December our plants' slender, mostly leafless limbs were bending beneath their heavy crops of fleshy calyxes, as seen at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214hb.jpg

I've read that harvesting the calyxes should begin when about half the plants' leaves have fallen, but I waited until later because our calyxes kept growing every day. This week the harvest began by snipping off the ends of calyx-bearing branches, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214hc.jpg

A box filled with the snipped-of, calyx-bearing tips of a single Roselle bush is shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214hd.jpg

The surprising manner in which that first harvested bush spread its side-branches so broadly is shown in a picture of the pulled-up, pruned plant being held by volunteer gardener Eric from Colorado, superintended by Katrina the dog, at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214hg.jpg

After the branches were snipped off, each calyx had to be removed from its stem section individually. Various ideas for speeding up the process were tried but in the end nothing went faster than simply cutting them off with the same snippers used duringn the stem-cutting photograph. A perfect removed calyx, its glands engorged with flavorful acids of various kinds, subtended by a star-shaped collection of succulent bracts, and enclosing the flower's immature capsular fruit, is shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214hf.jpg

Now came the most time-consuming part, that of removing the calyxes from around the acorn-sized fruits. Eric from Colorado is shown busily doing this next to a box filled with the harvest from the single first bush, at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214he.jpg

The question arose as whether the slender bracts beneath the calyx should be removed. The bracts were fleshy and tasted as flavorful and acidy as the calyx, so we kept them on.

Finally came the drying, which is ongoing. You can see our fancy drier beside a resplendent Bougainvillea at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214hh.jpg

There some freshly laid-out sepals are shown at the left, while the slightly darker ones at the right -- those from the first bush -- have had about half a day of drying in the sunlight. I read that three days of tropical sunlight are needed to produce properly dried sepals. The freshly laid-out sepals are shown close up at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214hi.jpg

Surprisingly, the second bush harvested -- the second from the end of the row where we started -- was only about half the size and half as productive as the first one. The third bush produced even less. Since all the plants grew in soil prepared the same way and received the same amounts of water and sunlight, I think that the inside bushes suffered from being too close together. I'd read that they needed to be a meter apart (3.3ft) but having started with such small seeds and seedlings I could hardly believe that, and settled for about 0.9 meter (3ft). Now I think that for maximum production they should have been at least 1.3 meters apart, maybe 1.5.

Also, the soil in which the plants grew had always had nematode problems. I'd loosened up and enriched the soil as best I could, and I hoped that that might solve that problem. When that first big plant turned up showing no nematode nodules on its roots, I thought I'd been successful. However, the next plant did moderately suffer from nematode infection, and the third plant's larger roots were in an even greater mess. I think that plants inside the row, stressed by being too close together, offered less resistance to their various antagonists.

I hope that our next Newsletter installment concerning the Roselles will show how a delicious tea is brewed from our own plants.

*****

ADELIA FLOWERING
Along a cowpath through the rancho's woods a small tree about ten feet tall (3m) has been issuing clusters of small, greenish flowers, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214tk.jpg

The flowers arise on slender pedicels issuing from where the leaves' petioles attach to the stem, in the axils, in groups of three or so, as seen at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214tl.jpg

Up close the flowers look like fuzzy little green stars, as seen at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214tm.jpg

The leaves' venation is noteworthy because of the unusual manner by which their secondary veins are connected by tertiary veins forming more or less rectangular cells, as seen at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214tn.jpg

However, it's the blossom that's most informative, being so distinctive that offers hope for identification.

First of all, there's no indication at all of male stamens, so our picture shows a unisexual female flower. The spherical, vaguely three-lobed item in the blossom's center is the ovary, and it's topped by four or maybe five styles. The ovary arises from the center of a white-woolly, doughnut-like thing that's present in only certain plant families, often known as a disc.

The unisexual flower with a vaguely three-lobed ovary pointed toward the big Euphorbia or Spurge Family, and reminded me that we've seen a flower similar to this, an a small tree in thornforest scrub up at Río Lagartos on the Yucatan's northern coast. That tree had been identified as Adelia oaxacana, a species too obscure to bear a useful common name. On that tree we found only male flowers, but they were fuzzy and star-shaped just like our cowpath tree, as you can see on our Adelia oaxacana page at https://www.backyardnature.net/mexnat/adelia.htm

Two Adelia species are listed for the Yucatan, and our cowpath tree is the second one. It's ADELIA BARBINERVIS, commonly occurring in the Yucatan's disturbed habitats, and described as a component of the "regrowth ecosystems" resulting from Mayan slash-and-burn milpa/cornfield agriculture.

Adelia barbinervis is fairly well documented on the Internet, but Adelia oaxacana is not. Herbarium specimens shown on the Internet show that the leaves of Adelia oaxacana are shallowly lobed at their bases, while leaves of our present Adelia barbinervis gradually diminish toward their bases. I found Adelia oaxacana flowering in June at the same time leaves emerged after the dry season, but the present Adelia barbinervis is flowering among leaves that have been present the entire rainy season.

Adelia barbinervis is native to southern Mexico south to El Salvador. Traditionally its leaves and fruits have been steeped in hot water to prepare a tea for general body-ache, and bathing the body with the tea has been thought to heal flesh wounds.

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LUEHEA TREES FLOWERING
During a morning jog I was alerted to a tree flowering above the woodland trail by the items shown lying on the ground at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214lu.jpg

Those are flowers, but not opened ones. The brown petal-like items are bracts spreading below unopened flower buds. I understood why they'd fallen prematurely when every flower bud proved to have been partially or totally eaten, sometimes by insect larvae, other times perhaps by birds pecking at them, or squirrels.

A few of the fallen aborted blossoms retained enough of their stamens and petals for me to recognize that the tree producing them was the Luehea that at this season conspicuously issues white flowers a little smaller than saucers. We've profiled the tree before, at https://www.backyardnature.net/yucatan/luehea.htm

When setting up that page I'd had only blossoms that looked a little weather beaten. This week some fresher looking ones came along on a tree beside the road to Temazón, which you can see at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214lv.jpg

A close-up of a blossom is at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214lw.jpg

Two similar-looking Luehea species occur in our area and I've had a little doubt about my ID. The most important distinction between the two species is the fruits. Luehea speciosa fruits are only modestly "ribbed," while Luehea candida fruits display prominent ridges along their sides. I never was sure of the boundary between "modestly ribbed" and "strongly ribbed.

However, now I read on W.J. Hayden's fine Flora of Kaxil-kiuic website that Luehea candida flowers early in the wet season (late June or July), while Luehea speciosa flowers late in the rainy season, and we're now in the early dry season not long after the rainy season. This supports my earlier identification.

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CLIMBING FERN
At https://www.backyardnature.net/chiapas/lygodium.htm we look at one of several species of Climbing Fern, that one encountered during a 2016 visit to the Lacandon Reserve in Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state. Last October 2nd, during a visit to the area around Palenque Ruins in Chiapas, the same species turned up, but it was less mature and looked a bit different from our earlier plant, which was photographed in May. You can see the recent find's less mature fronds at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214lg.jpg

About three climbing fern species, all in the genus Lygodium, might be found in the area. This one, Lygodium venustum, is most easily distinguished from the others by the manner in which the bases of its fingerlike frond sections project backward a little, forming "ears." Technically, they're said to be "hastate."

The feature indicating the immaturity of these fronds is that the margins of some of the fingerlike sections, such as those seen in the image's top, right, bear an unusual fringe of knobby items. Those knobby items, sometimes called marginal spikes, are where the fern's spore-producing sporangia are found, and on our previous find they were much larger. A close-up of some marginal spikes just starting to form, and also showing this fern's interesting venation, appears at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214lh.jpg

Climbing ferns are such unferny-looking plants that some find it hard to believe that they're ferns. They're even more remarkable when you consider that in the genus Lygodium the whole viny plant is just one much divided frond. However, our immature plant was still issuing new frond sections, and they were uncurling in the exact "fiddlehead" fashion of normal ferns -- they're "circinate" -- as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214li.jpg

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PEARL ANTHURIUM
Last October 3rd when I was camping near Palenque Ruins in Mexico's southernmost state of Chiapas, at the woods edge a vine dangled from branches of a tall tree, as seen at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214a1.jpg

The dangling cluster of waxy looking, pea-sized items at the image's right is what had caught my eye. Searching along the stem for other such clusters I found none, but in the above picture you can see several slender spikelike things issuing from the stem's leaf axils. One of them is shown close-up at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/181214a2.jpg

Seeing that, I knew we had an aroid, a member of the big, mostly tropical Arum Family, the Araceae. If you know North America's famous spring wildflower Jack-in-the-Pulpit, in the above picture you'll recognize the white colored Jack, though his "pulpit," or spathe, instead of mostly folding around and over him, directs back toward the stem. So, what kind of aroid is this?

Mostly by noting that the leaves did not issue milky sap when torn at the edges, that the venation was netted, and that the spathe was backward-pointing, it became clear that this was a member of the big genus Anthurium. Our plant shares some features with another big aroid genus, Philodendron, except that the veins in philodendron species parallel one another, any secondary veins not curving to meet one another, while in Anthurium they do, and so are "netted."

Knowing that we had an Anthurium producing clusters of pearly fruits, it was easy to determine that we had ANTHURIUM SCANDANS, distributed from Mexico south to Venezuela in northern South America. Two subspecies are recognized, and ours is the typical one, Anthurium scandens ssp. scandens. One English name it goes by is Pearl Anthurium. Its clusters of white fruits are pretty enough to cause the species to be planted in tropical gardens.

Last week we profiled the Mistletoe Cactus that at this same time was issuing white, pea-sized, waxy-looking fruits similar to these, though those fruits appeared at the ends of dangling stems. I wonder whether these two unrelated species might have undergone convergent evolution? Maybe at first they each independently evolved small, white fruits because for certain fruit-eating, seed dispersing animals such fruits are easy to see and easy to eat. Over time, both species may have further evolved their fruits to the same pea-size dimension, helping one another teach their commonly held fruit-eaters that these pea-sized white fruits were good. Just a guess, but probably a good one.

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NATURE'S ARROW
The "Nature as teacher" and "Nature as Bible" concepts in some minds bring up this question: "Can it really be that -- as Darwin's Survival of the Fittest suggests -- the stronger is supposed to dominate, maybe even enslave or kill, the weak, like an alpha wolf within his pack, or when the wolf pack falls upon a herd of grazing deer?"

That line of reasoning overlooks a basic feature of Nature as manifested here on Earth: The evolution of Life on Earth has shown direction. With the definiteness of an arrow shot at a target, that direction launched from among simple beings mechanically behaving as their genes dictated, toward us humans, of whom some of us some of the time can think and feel beyond the dictates of our genes.

Over many millions of years, in mid flight, Nature's evolutionary arrow passed through a landscape populated with organisms like reptiles, birds and early mammalian species who displayed behavior that sometimes was complex -- as building a nest of a certain kind -- but behavior still guided by innate impulses rooted in genetic coding. Among the most powerful such gene-based, innate impulses were and are the sexual drive, and the urges for status/identity, and territory/property.

Especially nowadays it's worthwhile to think clearly about which features of our thinking and feeling derive from genetically based innate drives -- the urges for sex, status, property, etc. -- and which are rooted in the higher mental domain reserved for humans. That's because at this moment in our history ever greater parts of humanity are misled by the "Survival of the Fittest" concept. They look at Donald Trump, for instance, see that he's a big winner in the sex, status and territory department, and decide that he's an exemplary being worth following and emulating.

But, Nature's arrow passed right through the evolutionary landscape featuring ever more aggressive competition for sex, status and territory, and continued beyond. Now the arrow is entering the domain of feelings and abstract thought liberated from genetic programming -- and there well may be other domains even beyond that.

To honor a winner in the sex, status and territory scene, while disregarding the significance of the thinking and feeling we humans are capable of, is to pervert one of Nature's most sacred teachings. To conduct our lives in harmony with what the Creator of the Universe has shown us She "wants" -- by sending Her arrow toward humans who can think and feel beyond the limits imposed by genetic programming -- is the highest goal a human can aspire to.

*****

Best wishes to all Newsletter readers,

Jim

All previous Newsletters are archived at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/.