Date: Wed, 20 Aug 1997 16:30:23 +0900 From: ss66428 <ss66428@hongo.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp> To: cp@opus.hpl.hp.com Message-Id: <aabcdefg3181$foo@default> Subject: Brazilian Expedition: LAST CHAPTER!!!!!!!
To all,
Finally on to the last chapter of this saga. The bad news is that I
have to hurry it up a bit and make it not-so-long, but the good news is that I
only have to do this because I am going on another CP expedition in two days!!
I leave on Friday August 22 and will only return on September 30th! I will
spend one week in Malaysia seeing Nepenthes with Bruce Salmon (Hi Bruce!) and
then 4 weeks going around all of southern Africa, including the famous Cape
Town region, where I will be meeting up with Eric Green (Hi Eric!). I should
have enough news when I come back to maintain another long CP soap opera on the
listserv (GASP! OH NO!). But before that, I have to write the last chapter of
the current one..........
I left the Corumba waterfall full of doubts flying around my head.
What had I found? Could it be the true D.hirtella var.hirtella, or maybe the
true D.h.lutescens, or maybe something new? Sometimes I almost regret finding
plants like these which make me have to throw everything I knew up in the air
and start from scratch again!!!
Sadly, as I pulled out in my car, I noticed a large sign right in the
middle of the grassy area where I found this weird plant (which I'm calling
D.sp."Pirineus" for the moment) announcing that that was the future site of
some aquatic park they were planning to build. I realized that was the first
and probably the last time I would see that site intact. But chances are that
whatever D.sp."Pirineus" is, it is probably not rare in the surrounding region.
Or so I hope.....
Back on the road, it only took me a few km to spot a fantastic hillside
covered with grasses and apparently seeping with water all over. Not only could
I see water glistening in the sunlight on a few open areas, but there were also
several vertical lines of darker grasses and buriti palms, proving that water
was perenially present.
I found a place to park by the road, as close to the hillside as I
could, gathered all my gear in my backpack, and headed out under a strong
summer midday sun, already sweating after a few paces, and still having to
pass under and over barbed wire a few times and hike through rather dry
savanna-like vegetation before I arrived at the grassy seepage. It was a huge
site where I could spend all day exploring, but I didn't have all day. Maybe
next time. So I only explored the areas closest to the road. The barbed wire
apparently separated various cattle ranches. Although I only saw a few horses,
the 'signs' and smells of cows were all over.
I didn't take me long to find Drosera. WHEW! What a relief! It was
typical (typical in my mind at least) D.h.hirtella!! How good it was to know
that what I thought was D.h.hirtella for so many years actually does grow on
the Serra dos Pirineus. So maybe D.sp."Pirineus" was actually the true
D.h.lutescens and the plants I had found in the western state of Mato Grosso
and had thought were D.h.lutescens were actually something new.
While doing everything I had to do at the D.h.hirtella site (pictures,
herbarium, GPS, etc.), I found one lonely specimen of D.sp."Pirineus". Then
moving on a few more hundred meters I came upon more D.h.hirtella. And suddenly
there it was!!! Dark purple-red rosette with a young, bright yellow scape with
same-colored hairs right in the middle, creating that beautiful color contrast.
That was D.h.lutescens!!!!! And growing right next to a typical D.h.hirtella,
the type of situation we always dream of finding for 2 similar taxa to click
our fingers away on the camera!
Whew! Another relief! So apparently there were 3 taxa in the D.hirtella
complex at the Serra dos Pirineus: D.h.hirtella, D.h.lutescens, and
D.sp."Pirineus". Saint-Hilaire seems to have missed one. Or more..... I
suddenly remembered the D.sp."white hirtella"-like specimen I had found at the
Corumba Waterfall. Then, looking around a bit more, I began turning up a few
oddball specimens which defied identification. Were they D.h.hirtella?
D.h.lutescens? D.sp."Pirineus"? D.sp."white hirtella"? Or maybe hybrids between
any 2 or more of these??????
I headed back to my car with a few questions solved, but with even more
new questions in mind. The Serra dos Pirineus is apparently the center of
distribution for the D.hirtella complex, which turned out to be much more
complex than I had ever imagined, and definitely needs more study.
Once in my car, before heading on to a new site, I took some more
pictures of the plants I had collected and made some herbaria. Taking special
care to clean and remove dirt from specimens of D.sp."Pirineus" (after all,
they would very likely become the holotype specimens once this new taxon is
formally described), I suddenly found that two plants each had a very clear
swelling on a root! This was it, more proof that these plants in the D.hirtella
complex truly do go dormant during the dry winter months, growing back from the
roots afterwards in a similar way to some South African Drosera.
This I had already deduced simply from observations made "above
ground", since roots in these taxa usually break off during collecting (meaning
that some pieces of roots are left behind and possibly produce new plants,
which I have observed happening with D.chrysolepis in the wild). I had also
previously seen very large swollen roots in cultivated specimens of
D.colombiana from Mato Grosso. Like D.hirtella, I had also initially believed
D.colombiana to be simply an annual.
After this site I drove on back towards Brasilia but did not see any
place by the road which looked likely enough to have CPs to be worth the effort
to walk to. So I turned the car at Brasilia and began the long trip back to
Sao Paulo, precisely 1015km. But the CP hunting was not yet over!! There were
places along the road I wanted to explore, especially around the town of
Cristalina, 124km S of Brasilia, where there seemed to be lots of good CP
areas and from where I had seen an interesting herbarium collection a few years
back, of a D.hirtella-like species. Wait a minute! I suddenly realized that
with the knowledge gathered in the past few days, I now knew what those plants
were! They were D.sp."white hirtella"!! It's funny to see how taxonomy works in
a cumulative way and how things which boggle your mind for years all of a
sudden become crystal clear!
I arrived in Cristalina just as it was getting dark. I spent the night
there and headed out early in the morning to explore the surroundings. I found
several apparently good CP areas, but the only CP I saw was U.nigrescens in
large numbers on wet rocks, with bright yellow flowers, huge long spurs, and
almost black scapes covered with a very sticky mucilage at the 'elbows'
between the pedicels and the scapes.
I could've done some more exploring, but I was tired and didn't feel
like hiking too far away from the car. So after driving around a bit more and
seeing no CPs by the road, I put my car back on track for Sao Paulo. The only
other CP stops I made that day were several hundred km south of Cristalina,
while cutting through Minas Gerais. Between the cities of Uberlandia and
Uberaba, when heading for Brasilia a few days before, I had seen various rows
of buriti palms, indicating water and possibly CPs, but had not had the time
to stop. I did check one of these out on the return trip, but only found the
obvious: D.communis, G.repens, U.hispida.
But hey, I couldn't complain! After all, I had only spent 5 days
going around Goias and the Federal District and look how much I saw and found!!
Not to mention all that I had found on the previous 2-week journey through
Minas Gerais. In all I covered around 7000km on both trips. Incredible, huh?
How many species did I see? I lost count! I was more than happy that my travels
through Brazil had been so productive in such a short time, but the thruth is,
it all only made the return to Japan the more difficult, knowing that there is
still so much to explore back home in Brazil!!
THE END!!!!!!!!!! (FINALLY!!!!!!!!!!!)
Fernando Rivadavia
Tokyo, Japan
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