Jim Conrad's Naturalist Newsletter of May 4, 2019

MELLEO VINE'S BIG BANG
Along a cow trail through the woods here on the ranch, this week a certain treetop-climbing woody vine, or liana, suddenly adorned itself with bright yellow, trumpet-shaped flowers, a small part of which is shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190504mf.jpg

A closer look at the flowers show that their corolla tubes nod downward where they issue from their calyxes, and the face made by the corolla lobes compensates for the nod by tilting its top backwards, as seen at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190504mg.jpg

You can see that the bottom corolla lobe makes a nice landing pad for pollinators, and ridges on the corolla tube's floor guide toward nectar down below. Pressed against the corolla tube's ceiling are four stamens whose anthers daub pollen atop any entering pollinator. Once the flowers are pollinated, the corollas fall off, brightly littering the ground, and on the stemsleaving conspicuous stigma-tipped styles poking from the green, bladdery calyxes, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190504mj.jpg

The calyxes are unusual not only because they are so large and bladdery, but also because they open at an oblique angle, with the upper side elongating to a slender point, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190504mh.jpg

Here toward the end of the hottest, driest part of the dry season, when many trees are leafless and the herbaceous layer is mostly dead or shriveled up, our cow-path liana is issuing surprisingly fresh, tender-looking leaves , each leaf consisting of two leaflets, seen at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190504mk.jpg

In that picture, notice at the top of the tendril's arch there are two scars. Those scars are where a previous season's two leaflets fell off. In this species, then, tendrils develop between the two leaflets, as seen at the tip of an elongating stem at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190504mn.jpg

Note that the tendrils produce three sharply clawed appendages that reach out for support like three clawed toes. Many new leaves bear no tendrils.

Despite all the above excellent field marks, this liana can be confused with other species in the area. For example, a commonly occurring liana with very similar flowers that also suddenly appear ("big bang" flowering ), and with very similar three-clawed tendrils is Cat-claw, Macfadyena uncata. However, two of the above field marks disqualify our cow-trail liana from being that species. First, Cat-claw's calyx opening isn't oblique, and its top side doesn't elongate into a tooth. An even more telling feature is shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190504mm.jpg

The ground below our liana was littered with last season's dropped capsular fruits. In the picture, paired seeds bearing papery "wings" to help with wind dispersal are seen at the left, while the two larger items on the right are split-apart sides from two different fruits. Cat-claw's fruits are very slender -- up to 27cm long (10 inches) but only about 18mm wide (1¾ inch). Our cow-trail fruits are shorter and wider, only up to about 15cm long (6 inches) but to about 5cm wide (2 inches)

The calyxes and fruits point to MELLOA QUADRIVALVIS, which could as easily be called Cats-claw as the Macfadyena, but I can't find anyone calling it that, so I think of it as the Melloa vine, which is a pretty enough name. Melloa quadrivalvis occurs throughout southern Mexico south through Central America to southern Brazil and northern Argentina.

Little other information is given about it on the Internet. But I can say that when Melloa quadrivalvis undergoes its Big Bang flowering time during the hottest, most dried-time of the dry season, it's a grand thing to behold.

RUIN SPIDERWORT
Last month, on April 1, as I wandered forest trails between Maya ruins in Ceibal Archaeological Park in northern Guatemala's Petén department, in a treefall area receiving plenty of sunlight, a certain fleshy-leafed herbaceous plant grew rankly, covering the whole opening. One of the plants, clearly a monocot because of its leaves' many fine veins paralleling one another, is shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190504ta.jpg

Each flower bears three petals and six stamens, which is normal for monocot flowers. Dicot flowers usually have their parts in fours or fives, or multiples thereof.

Seeing this arrangement of fleshy monocot herbs bearing flower groups subtended and cupped by modified leaves, we need to think "The Spiderwort Family, the Commelinaceae." Another feature of the Commelinaceae is that the leaf bases normally wrap around the stem, forming a "sheathe," and our plant's leaves do that nicely, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190504tf.jpg

The Spiderwort Family is a medium-sized one, with about 650 species in around 41 genera, mostly occurring in tropical, subtropical and warm areas. Northerners who pay attention to wildflowers and weeds probably are familiar with two genera in the family: Commelina, in which dayflowers and widow's-tears occur, and Tradescantia, the spiderworts. In size and shape the three petals of Commelina flowers vary conspicuously from one another, while in Tradescantia the petals are all alike. We have a Tradescantia.

Among the 70 or so Tradescantia species -- all American -- ours is fairly easy to distinguish, mostly because of the exceptionally long peduncles bearing flower clusters. Here we have TRADESCANTIA ZANONIA, the Gentian-leaved Spiderwort, which I didn't recognize despite having found it earlier in a chilly, high-elevation cloud forest in southern Veracruz state, in Mexico, back in 2015. That plant is profiled at the bottom of the page at https://www.backyardnature.net/mexnat/zanonia.htm

Because the habitats of the two plants so differed from one another, it never occurred to me that the Tradescantia in Veracruz could be the same as this one in very hot, lowland Guatlemala. Apparently this is an adaptable species. But note that despite the different habitats and the geographical distance between them, both populations were flowering in April.

If you do an Internet search on the name Tradescantia zanonia, you'll find few pictures of plants looking like ours and growing in the wild. However, there will be hundreds of images of a strongly variegated basket plant with white and green stripes, commonly sold commercially as "Mexican Flag." I used to grow it myself, but never would have associated the potted plants with our leggy wild plants.

PACAYA PALM WITH ROOTING INTERNODES
Last month, on April 1, as I wandered forest trails between Maya ruins in Ceibal Archaeological Park in northern Guatemala's Petén department, palm trees abounded, especially a small-growing species with pinnately compound leaves, like the ones shown in a clearing beside a ruin at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190504pp.jpg

This looks like a very common palm species in this region's remaining patches of forest, Chamaedorea tepejilote, sometimes known as the Pacaya Palm, which we profile at https://www.backyardnature.net/chiapas/pacaya.htm

However, notice that from the base of the clump of larger palms on the right, a dark, slender stem arcs to the base of the smaller palm at the left. I'd never seen a Pacaya Palm do that. Another view of the arcing stem is shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190504pq.jpg

Once closer attention was paid to this species' appearance, I found its stems often producing clumps of thick aerial, adventitious roots so heavy that the stems leaned away from the clump, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190504pt.jpg

Convinced that this must be a different species than the Chamaedorea tepejilote I was so familiar with, for identification purposes I photographed a fruiting structure, shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190504pr.jpg

On the Internet, however, all the above field marks led right to the common Chamaedorea tepejilote, and the Flora de Veracruz was good enough to state that this species often produces numerous adventitious roots on its stem.

So, nothing new here, except that I personally have enlarged my understanding for, and appreciation of, the Pacaya Palm, Chamaedorea tepejilote.

SHOESTRING FERN
Last March 28th, when I hiked into the campground of northern Guatemala's El Rosario National Park, on the east side of Sayaxché in the Petén department, one of the first things I did was to go check on the remarkable fern shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190504vt.jpg

That fern had caught my attention during an earlier visit there, in late September of 2018, but I'd not featured it here because it wasn't producing spores, and I thought I'd need to see the spore producing structures for a good identification. However, on my return to the park this March 28th, there still was no sign of spores. Maybe the plant shown is too immature, for they can form much larger bodies than the one shown.

This kind of fern produces its spore-producing sporangia inside the narrow fronds' curved-under margins. A close-up of a cross-section of a frond shows the curved-under margins at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190504vu.jpg

I'd known to look for sporangia beneath the curved-under margins because this is such an unusual fern that I'd read about it and seen it's pictures. Usually in English ferns looking like this are called shoestring ferns. They belong to the genus Vittaria.

In 1990 the genus Vittaria was regarded as having 50-80 species, but in 1997 many of the species were transferred to other genera, or declared to be the same as other species, so that now only six species are recognized, and those six can be hard to distinguish. However, our Guatemalan plant looks exactly like the most commonly occurring one, VITTARIA LINEATA, broadly distributed from Georgia and Florida in the US and the Caribbean area, south throughout Mexico and Central America, to central South America, so we'll park it under that name until someone advises us that it's not. Another reason for guessing that it's Vittaria lineata is that that speies is so robust and adaptive that it's "gone wild" as an invasive in several tropical counties.

Shoestring ferns mainly occur on the shaded, moist trunks of trees. In the US usually they're found on trunks of Cabbage Palms; in Rosario National Park, they're on trunks of Cohune Palms, where the fronds attach to the trunk, collecting organic matter and moisture.

Florida's indigenous Seminole people traditionally used Shoestring Fern to treat senility and depression, simply boiling the fern and giving the "tea" to the patient. The Guayami of Panama treated headaches with it.

MORNING MOTMOT
A little before dawn Turquoise-browed Motmots hanging around the hut issue their hoarse fog-horn calls, rwwwrroh, rwwwrroh, rwwwrroh. Later, when I prepare to jog it's still fairly dark, but the motmots are easy to see, or at least their turquoise brows are, exploding within the morning's somberness. A dawn motmot with his luminescent brow ablaze is shown at the right.

Motmots have a way of flying near and staring that might spook a nervous, superstitious person. Even I sometimes think they look like they're trying to convey something to me.

When I started thinking about what their message might be, my first thought was that I was glad these gorgeous birds were at the hut, and not where a little Maya kid could slingshot them, or one of the local bird catchers snare them to sell as caged birds. The Maya are exceptionally fine people, but the average one has little or no feelings for birds, pigs, dogs or the like.

But, then, when I was a little kid on the backcountry farm in western Kentucky, I was the same. My father one day went to town and bought several leg-traps which he set atop fence posts to catch "chicken hawks." Before long one entire wall of our smokehouse was covered with nailed-on hawk and owl wings. I was envious, eager to do the same, but my dad didn't want me fooling with traps. I remember lots of turtles and birds I killed just for the fun of it, with my BB gun and bow and arrows.

Looking back, I forgive myself because I was just a little kid programmed by my family and community. I can forgive my family and community, too, because back then often it seemed like Nature was the enemy, with Her spring floods, late crop-killing freezes, suffocatingly hot, long summers, droughts, unbelievable numbers of mosquitoes from coalmine-polluted streams...

Replacing mosquito-breeding vegetation with neat grass, gravel or concrete, and replacing the swamps with money-making soybean fields seemed like good ideas. This was the Bible Belt, too, so officially Nature was at the service of humans. Chicken hawks had to go. It's still a bit like that now among backcountry Maya.

However, I, rural western Kentucky society and the Maya have changed, and are changing. In fact, I'd say that the most important feature of being a human is that, unlike motmots, humans and human societies can change -- progress from lower levels to higher ones.

But, isn't it dangerous to talk about others in terms of lower and higher levels of enlightenment? Who is to say what's a lower or a higher level?

It's a sticky matter. On the one hand, there's a long history of invading societies rationalizing their violence with a claim of "helping the locals emerge from barbarity."

On the other hand, if the main impulse of Nature Herself appears to be to evolve from simple, none-thinking, none-feeling states, to ever more diversity, ever greater intelligence among evolving beings, and ever greater feeling among the thinkers, isn't "progression from lower to higher states" something that at the very least we should think and talk about?

I think it is, but only with the greatest care, for, from what I can see, the road to higher enlightenment is not one simple path.

As such, it's questionable that I, rural Kentucky and the Maya have taken the road to enlightenment by changing to how we live today. However, because of how the Universal Creative Impulse has managed the evolutionary history of Nature here on Earth, and because of my own conviction that today I'm at a higher level of enlightenment than I used to be, I feel confident in saying this:

Any person or society is progressing toward a higher level of being if with time, in general, there's more understanding about the surrounding world, and more compassion for more different kinds of being. "Field marks" for enlightenment, then, are exercised curiosity, and compassion.

That's part of what the morning motmots undoubtedly are saying to me.