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Myrmecodia erinacea - or related species - Triton Bay, Irian Jaya


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Edit Andreas Wistuba - 10th of May 2014

 

Please compare this plant with the plants found near Timika.

Leaves and petioles seem to match perfectly, yet spines are completely different!

 

In any case, what I got really looks much different. Leaves and petioles of mine come much closer to the FB-picture.

I am tempted to opening yet another thread for my plant...  

 

Here are some pictures - please do not look too closely at the mess in the background... ;)

 

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Just a thought:

Could it be possible, that we are looking at a hybrid swarm??? 

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Andreas:

No, not "Goose". I think this is one of the other sp. collected at same site. "Yes" I think it's the FB plant on mangroves. I will PM you pics of what I think is mother on Monday. Based on that image, it should self vigorously. IMO, perfectly good sp., just not what Frank and I grow. Fantastic bit of luck. At end of day, if both sides get seed, better still!!

I have just re-examined Frank's images and am suddenly struck that it is indeed a different plant from mine. This would clearly explain the differences in type of floral heterostyly we have observed in our respective plants as we attempt to polllinate them.

J

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Andreas:

No, not "Goose". I think this is one of the other sp. collected at same site. "Yes" I think it's the FB plant on mangroves. I will PM you pics of what I think is mother on Monday. Based on that image, it should self vigorously. IMO, perfectly good sp., just not what Frank and I grow. Fantastic bit of luck. At end of day, if both sides get seed, better still!!

I have just re-examined Frank's images and am suddenly struck that it is indeed a different plant from mine. This would clearly explain the differences in type of floral heterostyly we have observed in our respective plants as we attempt to polllinate them.

J

 

:)

 

That is exactly how I was hoping, the forum would work!

Several eyes simply see more than just two and some kind of "crowd-brain" has ideas a single one does not have.

I was completely blind when it comes to Myrmecodia erinacea and M. alata, yet the solution was very easy.

Just a bit of pooling ideas between Frank and me...

 

All the best

Andreas

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  • 2 weeks later...

harm , no flower open :rolleyes:  , what colour ?

no dissection  , to see the stigma ,the anther, the ring of hair?

 

strange these raised areas prominent , surrounded by  horseshoe-shaped arcs of adjacent entrance holes ,on the tuber , no

 

very very little spine on it

 

leaves with a little petiole white-green , oblanceolate

 

for me no M.erinacea or alata

 

jeff

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  • 8 years later...

I bought a plant of this species from Andreas in May of 2019.  Looking at his photos above it was obvious this plant would grow well hanging over the lip of a pot.  Since I grow under lights in a basement hanging baskets are not one of my favorite ways to grow so I planted it instead in a 6 inch shallow vanda tray and slid that under one of my 4 foot T5 fluorescent fixtures.  You can see here that it grew well in that situation so it came time to upsize the pot.

 

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As it grew over the edges of that Vanda tray I moved it into a much larger tray, 22 inches by 11 inches :

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If you look closely at the the branches to the left and right side of the tray you can tell that each grew into another 6 inch vanda tray.  So when it comes a time to propagate and transplant I can snip the narrow neck where it enters into the two side trays and lift those trays out with minimal root disturbance.

 

 

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The last few months this plant has produced some flowers.  No sign of fruits yet. So I pulled out my cameras and microscope and took some photos.  Not the best photos I have ever taken but perhaps good enough to gets us some confirmation of it being in the alata complex or even to narrow it down to a particular species.

The flower buds are not very large and they open just barely and not for a very long time.  My ruler in the photos is numbered in centimeters so the distance between each of the short unnumbered lines is a millimeter.

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Microscopic photo of a cut open flower bud. The almost triangle shaped piece of tissue pinned just above the bottom of the stamens got torn off the bottom of the floral tube, so its 3 mm added to the 9 mm of the intact portion of the flower means a flower length of at least 12 mm.  The stamens clearly number 4.

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This photo confirms the long style and shows that the stigma has at least 2 parts.  Also here is the first confirmation of upright pointing hairs lining the bottom of the floral tube.

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This last photo confirms that the 4 stamens are positioned near the bottom of the floral tube and the multitude of upright pointing hairs in the throat of the tube.

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