Myrmecodia platytyrea subsp antoinii, Cape York Peninsula, North Queensland, Australia.

[Derrick]

IMG_0118B. Myrmecodia platytyrea subsp. antoinii. Iron Range National Park, Cape York Peninsula, Queensland, Australia..JPG]

[Ash]

Lovely images Derrick. For your interest here is a Myrmecodia platytyrea subsp. antoinii from the McIlwraith Ranges further south. This plant I labelled 'hang loose'.

 

 

regards

 

Ash

[jeff]

Bonjour

 

magnifique first picture DERRICK   with these clypeoli alignment 

 

jeff

[Aurélien]

Nice pitures, indeed!

[Stone Jaguar]

Ash & Derrick:

 

Fantastic in situ images, again. Thank you for posting these here.

 

I was fortunate to obtain some seed of this taxon that was reportedly collected from the upper end of the Cape York Peninsula almost a decade ago. To my mind, this accession produced the nicest-looking M. platytyrea that I have seen. Unfortunately, I was never able to produce seed from these plants, so they may be reproductively different from the Mossman Gorge material, that is self fertile and fruits fairly well in youth.

 

These are photos taken just over four years ago of one of these plants in my garden in Guatemala. For scale, the plant is in a 20 cm wide basket. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, I never imported any plants from this origin into the US.

 

J

 

 

 

[Derrick]

This is a small and rather anomalous population of M. platytyrea subsp antoinii found just off the road to Portland Roads village, Kutini-Payamu (Iron Range) National Park, North Queensland. They were very different from the norm and I now wish I had taken far more interest in them.

   A diagnostic feature of subspecies antoinii is that leaves tend to be wider above their mid point while subspecies platytyrea has leaves generally wider below their midpoint.  

Edited.

[Stone Jaguar]

Derrick and all:

Beyond my general disagreement with use of the trinomial/subspecific concept at this juncture, one of the things that I find confusing about H&J 1993 is their use of this taxonomic ranking for M. platytyrea and every other Myrmecodia spp. except for M. tuberosa, where they opted to use varietal names to split that taxon into a confusing array of what may ultimately be shown to be perfectly good species. While I fully embrace the practice of appending locality names to identify morphologically distinct plant populations of interest to horticulture; back to the point, I am not sure I understand why H&J decided to split M. platytyrea the way they did given the fact that M. platytyrea antoinii is widely distributed in NE Oz and PNG and seems (admittedly, from afar) to be just a very variable looking plant.

In any case, two key characters they cite in the publication to diagnose the two subspecies do not actually hold water in an actual examination of both cultivated and wild material. The "leaf is generally broader above/below the mid-point" statement is, frankly, questionable given the illustration that they provide in their own paper of a M. p. platytyrea with leaves clearly broader above the midpoint...leaves of both "subspecies" shown from different localities on this forum are all over the map with regard to this characteristic, with widest part of leaf above, at, or below the midpoint often visible on the same plant. See also Andreas' images from Biak Island in West Papua, which also have leaves broadest above midpoint, but otherwise appear to fit M. p. platytyrea as currently described. The other character they cite, which is that clypeoli on M. platytyrea antoinii are more or less isodiametric while those of the nominate subspecies are longer than broad, is also unreliable as can be seen by scrutiny of some of Ash's photos of plants at both Mossman Gorge and the Cape York Peninsula, as well as your photo above from Iron Range NP (not as clear, but still evident) not to mention cultivated material also shown in these posts. This character appears to vary from individual to individual in response to environmental conditions and age.

In closing, I suspect that there are indeed "good" morphological characteristics that are useful to identify the different ecotypes of M. platytyrea, they're just not these two.

Cheers,

J

[jeff]

on your third picture the plant have orange petiol ?

 

for me   this point "leaf is generally broader above/below the mid-point" is not a good discriminant ,too indistinct.

 

a good discrimimant, is a discriminant perennial and reproducible by seed.

 

for plants that interest us we must take all the morphological characters that can be discriminating:

-tuber
-stem
-leaves
-inflorescence
 
in taxonomy we have 2 other lower ranks the variety and form ,I'm not sure that the concept of ecotype is taken into account in taxonomy .

 

it seems to me a difference between M.platytyrea subsp platytyrea and M.platytyrea subsp antoinii, the tuber, No   ?

 

jeff

 

[Derrick]

Note the particularly vivid orange fruits on this specimen. I almost labelled it M. tuberosa in error.

Myrmecodia platytyrea subsp. antoinii, Iron Range National Park, Cape York..JPG]

[Derrick]

The same plant as above in its setting on a Pandanus plant.  Note the lines of juvenile plants very probably planted by a resident ant colony.

Myrmecodia platytyrea subsp. antoinii, Iron Range National Park..JPG]

[jeff]

On your picture  we seen near the 2 red-orange-drupe a very good clypeoli to platytyrea  and  the tuber  have spines on mounds

 

jeff

[Aurélien]

Hi Derrick,

 

Thanks for these pictures.

 

Note the lines of juvenile plants very probably planted by a resident ant colony.

 

The level of mutualism always surprise me...