THE CUTTING EDGE
Volume IX, Number 1, January 2002
NEWS AND NOTES I LEAPS AND BOUNDS I GERMANE LITERATURE I SEASON'S PICK I
ACANTHACEAE. INBio firebrand Alexander (‘Popeye’) Rodríguez recently organized a dragnet of the Refugio Nacional de Vida Silvestre Bosque Nacional Diriá, on the Península de Nicoya, in search of a mystery Asteraceae that he had gotten in bud a few years back. Imagine his surprise, when flowering material was produced by parataxonomist Joe Cárdenas, to discover that he was in the wrong family. But what a find! Popeye’s perseverance paid off big time, with not merely a new sp. for the Costa Rican flora, but a new genus and major disjunction to boot. Once he realized he was dealing with a member of the Acanthaceae, Popeye was able to quickly determine his plant as Chileranthemum pyramidatum (Lindau) T. F. Daniel, mainly with the aid of the Flora of Guatemala (where the sp. is described and illustrated under the name Trybliocalyx pyramidatus Lindau). The oligotypic Chileranthemum has heretofore been recorded only from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. This discovery drives home a lesson that we learned long ago: even though the dry-forest flora of the Guanacaste region has been thoroughly atomized, the many scattered patches that remain harbor innumerable treasures of this sort.
ORCHIDACEAE. Two recent collections from the Estación Biológica La Selva by Universidad de Costa Rica specialist Mario Blanco have been identified as Pelexia obliqua (J. J. Sm.) Garay [AKA Cyclopogon obliquus (J. J. Sm.) Szlach.]. This would be the first record of this sp. for both La Selva and Costa Rica. Previously it has been found in El Salvador, Nicaragua, the West Indies, and Asia (Hong Kong and Java). It is known from Nicaragua by just one collection, from Isla Ometepe in Lago de Nicaragua. This report comes to us from Carlos Morales, via Jorge Gómez-Laurito; our thanks to both gentlemen.