Solomon Islands ant-plants

[Frank]

This originally appeared on this site in the forum "Hydnophytum" within the topic "Hydnophytum longistylum" with this entry:

"An international group spearheaded by Guadalcanal islanders is currently doing a survey of high altitude plants in the forests of Guadalcanal:

https://www.idigbio.org/content/discovering-new-plant-species-guadalcanals-mountains

 

It will be interesting to see if specimens of Hydnophytum longistylum are refound - and what other species might show up, perhaps H. kajewskii?

UPDATE:  The expidition took place in Sept. of 2015.  A preliminary report is here:

https://www.usp.ac.fj/news/story.php?id=1955"

 

I inquired recently with The University of South Pacific’s (USP) Institute of Applied Science (IAS) who organized the expedition for more recent publications and results.  They directed me to this resource:

http://siflora.nmns.edu.tw/

In the "specimens" section here you can access 15 to 20 herbarium sheets for both Hydnophytum and Myrmecodia.  The sheets are easy to enlarge and very legible.  Most plants are unidentified and in the case of the Myrmecodias some are not even Myrmecodias.  It is not clear to me that these are actually the results of the 2015 USP expedition but most of the sheets were collected in 2015 and 2016. These are worth looking at.  The sheets are from a Taiwan institution.

 

In addition I found this report on the 2015 USP expedition written by one of the fern collectors on the trip.  Again, this is worth reading:

https://blog.tepapa.govt.nz/2015/10/23/expedition-to-the-solomon-islands/  - and there are a number of further links at the bottom of this report.

[jeff]

excellent  infos  on the salomon island species , 😍

merci  FRANK