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MEXICAN WEDGETAIL DAMSELFLY
At the rancho's little cement-lined pond so far five dragonfly species have been identified, but no damselflies. Damselflies belong to the same insect order as dragonflies, Odonata, but dragonfly wings stick out ±perpendicularly from their bodies, while damselfly wings swoop backwards, coming together over their slender abdomens. Therefore, this week when a damselfly turned up perched on a white PVC tube running into the pond, I knew we had something new for us. You can see the little beauty at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190104dm.jpg
Because in the arid Yucatan so few damselfly species exist, you'd think that identifying them would be as easy as finding a list of species, then comparing each listed species with identified images found online. Often that approach works, but in the Yucatan few groups of plants and animals have been extensively studied and documented, so you feel lucky just to find a list.
I did find Dennis Paulson's paper "Odonata from the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico," and did look up each species in the damselfly suborder Zygoptera, but no image found perfectly matched the individual in our picture.
Our rancho damselfly displays two main noteworthy features. First, the slender abdomen is all black except for the blue patch at the tip. Several species have black abdomens with narrow, encircling blue bands. The second noteworthy feature is that the blue patch at the abdomen tip extends down the abdomen's sides. On other species with blue abdomen tips, the blueness is confined to the top.
The best match of all the species in the list was with ACANTHAGRION QUADRATUM, often known in English as the Mexican Wedgetail. The species bears an English name because it's found in Texas, as well as throughout Mexico and south to Costa Rica. It's regarded as an abundant species, so finding it here is no surprise. Also, a species occurring over such a large area probably displays local regional variations, so it well may be that our Yucatan damselflies simply have all-black abdomens with no narrow, blue encircling rings.
Hardly any information about the species' behavior and life history is available, so someday a researcher may be happy to see this documentation of the species appearing in early January on a PVC pipe jutting 50cm high above the waters of a garage-size, cement-lined pond in north-central Yucatan. At least one other of the species also was flitting about, the one on the pipe occasionally darting out and flying at it, then sailing around a little, before returning to the pipe.
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NISSOLIA VINE FLOWERING
At https://www.backyardnature.net/mexnat/nissolia.htm we've documented the strange winged legumes of a semi-woody vine with no good English name. We just call it Nissolia, after its binomial of Nissolia fruticosa. Our fruit pictures were taken two years ago, and it's taken until now for me to find a vine with flowers, despite the fact that the vine bearing the flowers covered the top of a tree right next to the garden. You can see this, the vine stealing its tree's sunlight like Kudzu might in the southern US, at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190104ns.jpg
The Nissolia vine's flowers are small and not very noticeable. Clusters of slender racemes of flowers on a branch tip at the top of the tree are seen at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190104nt.jpg
Besides their smallness, a noteworthy feature of the flowers is that they attach obliquely to slender pedicels about the same length as their corollas. Also, most blossoms don't open very widely, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190104nu.jpg
I'd assumed that such flowers were structured to accommodate smaller pollinators, but I saw numerous larger bees as well as many ants visiting the flowers. A flower close-up displaying the "papilionaceous" corolla's large top petal called the standard, two pinkish side petals called wings, and the two lower petals with their common margin fused to form a scoop-shaped "keel" is shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190104nv.jpg
Now we've documented both the flowers and fruits of the usually overlooked Nissolia vine. An interesting point to make is that two years ago our fruiting pictures were made in early December, but this year our vines are flowering in early January. This year our rainy season seemed a bit rainier, and the early dry season also has been rainier than usual, so maybe that accounts for it.
Nissolia fruticosa is widely distributed throughout tropical America. Its herbaceous to semi-woody stems are used by country people to tie together loads of firewood.
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ADELIA FRUITS ALMOST RIPE
At https://www.backyardnature.net/mexnat/adelia2.htm we see the leaves and curious-looking unisexual female flowers of a small tree with no English name, Adelia barbinervis, growing along a rancho cowpath. When the flower pictures were taken, in early December, the ovary only faintly was three-lobed, a hint at the species' membership in the big Euphorbia or Spurge Family. Now those flowers are producing conspicuously hairy, three-lobed, immature fruits worth paying attention to. You can see one at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190104aa.jpg
Already you can see the sutures that later will split, forming an opened, three-parted capsule, from which three seeds will come. I'm looking forward to seeing whether the seeds will be ejected, just tumble out, or maybe dangle from a stringlike funiculus. One interesting feature is that already the ground below the tree is covered with hundreds of unopened, green fruits, aborted before they opened. Still, thousands of healthy-looking fruits remain on the little tree.
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DEVIL'S GUT/ DOG-TAIL/ CLIMBING CACTUS
Last October 3rd during my camping trip into Mexico's southernmost state of Chiapas, climbing a large tree trunk beside the entry station to Palenque National Park, on the road from the town of Palenque, was the cactus shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190104sc.jpg
In the more arid Yucatan Peninsula to the north, commonly we see a tree-living cactus with similar stems, Hylocereus undatus, one of several cacti known as Night-blooming Cereuses, and whose reddish, large, sweet fruits are sold commercially as dragon fruits. But the stems of that cactus range throughout the trees, not attaching themselves to the tree trunk as closely as these. Plus, these stems did something the Yucatan species never does, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190104sd.jpg
In places, our Palenque cactus's stems expanded and flattened out. Later, on a shaded limestone rock, I found the hugely expanded stem section shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190104sf.jpg
Since this was something new for me, I began photographing important field marks to help with later identification. A close-up of a stem section producing six or seven strongly angled "wings" atop which clusters of spines arose is shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190104se.jpg
Subtle details of spine clusters often are necessary to distinguish look-alike species, so a typical cluster of hard spines often subtended by white collars of compacted, woolly hairs is shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190104sg.jpg
The cactus wasn't flowering but at least one well formed immature fruit was found, shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190104si.jpg
One other fruit, ripened to a golden yellow hue, later turned up on another tree, shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190104sh.jpg
On the Internet it was easy to find pictures of this species by doing an image search on the keywords "climbing cactus Mexico." However, none of those photographs bore a technical name, the binomial. English names applied to the species seemed invented for tourist consumption. In Belize, "jungle river-tour" operators call them Dragon Guts or Devil's Guts. In other places it's "Wrap Around Cactus" or "Dog-Tail Cactus."
Using technical literature I "keyed out" the species to SELENICEREUS TESTUDO. This surprised me because several times we've met another climbing cactus of this genus, Selenicereus grandiflora, with which you can compare our Palenque one, at https://www.backyardnature.net/q/rat-tail.htm
From that species and literature on the Internet I'd gained the impression that Selenicereus species bear weak, hair-like spines on finger-thick stems, very unlike our Palenque cactus. I was so insecure about the identification that I posted pictures in the identification section of the forum at the extensive and wonderful CactiGuide.Com website.
Quickly some experts responded that, yes, it really was Selenicereus testudo, just that the vast majority of photos of the species, and even much technical data, documents potted plants growing outside the tropics, where the species looks much more like our earlier-encountered Selenicereus grandiflora.
Our Palenque Selenicereus testudo species is distributed from southern Mexico (including the less arid southern Yucatan Peninsula) south to Costa Rica. Mostly it grows on trees, but sometimes is found on the ground, as was the case with the much-expanded, ±heart-shaped section shown above.
Why would Selenicereus testudo flatten out in certain instances? One reason may be that such expanded stems often form corky chambers between the stem and tree trunk, where ants nest. And ants often provide protection to plants vulnerable to feeding animals.
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HOT, DRY WIND
From the village of Santa Rita to the Rancho the shortest route is by a narrow dirt trail passing through woods on both ends, but with a middle section crossing a broad, open expanse of weedy, semi-abandoned pastures and cornfields. I like biking across that open part. Everywhere else here trees block the winds and limit the sky but, in that middle part, hot, dry wind and dazzling sunlight blast and scorch you, and somehow that just suits me.
I was returning from Santa Rita because in Ek Balam the Internet was down, and Santa Rita has a nice little student-supply shop, a papelería, with five computers and a wifi signal available for ten pesos/hour, about 50¢US. The Internet service is supported by a government program for isolated indigenous communities, to help them integrate. Usually there's a local lady tending the store, often babysitting a kid or two, transfixed by cartoons on a computer.
So, that day, after issuing the latest Newsletter, I'd checked the world news, and as hot, dry, wind and heavy sunlight parched by body, my mind spewed thoughts about essays I'd love to write about what's happening in the world right now.
But, hot, dry wind somehow focuses the mind, and teaches this: Where just a few days before there was lush greenness in which pooled whole worlds of fragile possibilities, the time comes when flowers and fleshy leaves, like dreams, dry up, shrivel, crumble, maybe die. What endures, if anything, is the hard seed, and the tough, knotty rhizome keeping a low profile deep in the dirt. Maybe rains will return, but maybe not. Only the very moment's hot, dry wind is for sure, and maybe that's good enough, unless you've let yourself fall in love with flowers and shadowy moist places amid fleshy leaves.
Somehow that scorched, puckered-up perspective made me remember what happened toward the end of the last rainy season. At that time I'd decided that the spiritual insight I'd been groping toward my whole life finally had taken enough form in my mind to talk about it. And then through my philosopher friend Eric in Mérida, I'd learned that that very insight had a name, "monism," and that Plato had understood it, and untold numbers of thinkers and mystics before and since had, too.
But, instead of humanity embracing the insight, accepting that we are enmeshed in an infinitely complex web of interdependencies among all things, and that we should be careful about screwing things up for our own personal gains, the masses simply ignored it. Among thinkers the concept fractured into conservative, liberal and simply bizarre interpretations that morphed into cultish schools of thought and religion ornamented with ceremonial and administrative add-ons, so that now "monism" is just part of humanity's mental clutter, a minor entry awash in the Wikipedia database.
So, there's no need for more essays, except for the mere fun of writing them. Such essays are flowers at the end of a rainy season, and the world news as manifested on the Internet in the little papelería in Santa Rita testifies that humanity now faces another of its cyclical dry seasons, the character of which the deforested, soil-destroyed, invasive-species-choked middle part of the trail from Santa Rita to the rancho is a harbinger.
Crossing the field I breathe it all in, and breathe it all out, and then I enter the shadowy woods at the other side, and the trail goes on and on until rancho dogs run out barking my welcome home, as in a dream.
*****
Best wishes to all Newsletter readers,
Jim
All previous Newsletters are archived at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/.
