Myrmecophyla tibicinis, cultural notes

In a basket, under the shade of a large avocado tree

Growing on a palm trunk in full sun

St. Croix Botanical Gardens

In areas with warm weather Myrmecophyla tibicinis does very well when grown in a basket or mounted on a tree.   This orchid can grow in full sun, in fact it needs a certain amount of full sun exposure or it will not bloom.  Keeping this plant in too much shade is a common error among beginners.  However, this plant seem to grow better when is given a slight bit of shade from the sun when it is at its most intense, which locally is between the hours of 11 am and 4 pm.

This orchid can produce a huge specimen plant if well cared for.  In one of the photos above you can see a truly humongous specimen in a Ceiba pentandra tree in the St. Croix botanical gardens.   To me the key to have a large and floriferous plant, aside from the right level of sun exposure, is giving it the proper fertilizing when it is producing new pseudobulbs.  This plant should be given a high nitrogen fertilizer when it is growing to help it produce full sized pseudobulbs.  Small, undersized pseudobulbs will not bloom.

The plant growing mounted in a palm trunk, in full sun all day long, produces relatively short inflorescences.  The plant in the basket, which is growing under an avocado tree with a comparatively open canopy, produces the typical long inflorescences.  The inflorescences grow until they emerge from the canopy of the avocado tree, then they produce the flowers.

Epidendrum ackermanii Hágsater 2004, in Maricao, the inflorescence of a plant growing under the shade of a Clusia rosea

Most flowers of this species are a pale lilac color, this inflorescence had unusually deep colored flowers.  I saw this plant in the Maricao forest in an area where a rockslide had obliterated all plants in its path.  This orchid is growing under the shade of a Clusia rosea tree.

This is the most common color of these orchids.

Epidendrum anceps Jacq. 1763, The flowers of 2015 in comparison with those I found in the same place in 2011

January 2015

January 2015

February 2011

February 2011

A few years ago I found a clump of stems of Epidendrum anceps growing in the crest of a hill in the Maricao forest. Since then, I visit these plants once a year to check how they are doing and to photograph the flowers.  In 2011 the clump had an inflorescence with green flowers.  In 2015, only one of the inflorescences had not suffered damage.  It was not clear what had damaged the inflorescences before they had finished their growth.  The only one with flowers had a distinct purple color in the edge of the lip.  Apparently, rather than all the stems being a single plant, the clump is composed of two plants growing very close together.  Hopefully next year I will be able to photograph both colors of flowers side by side.

Flower variability "in situ" in a Psychilis macconnelliae Sauleda 1988 population in a small area of coastal habitat in St. Croix

On April 6, 2014, I had the privilege to visit a reserve in St. Croix that hosts a population of Psychilis macconnelliae.  The dry coastal vegetation in which this orchid lives is composed mainly of low woody shrubs and scattered trees.  This type of habitat is hardly welcoming, with many thorny plants and vines that make it at times almost impassable.   The orchids were growing close to the beach.  The strong wind from the sea made taking good photos a difficult challenge as it would shake the flowers even when pains were taken to keep the inflorescence still.    The constant, and at times strong, wind keeps the local temperature from approaching the furnance like feeling one gets in other Caribbean islands in similar habitat but in less windy locations.  The temperature was in the eighties at the moment I visited.  

Because moving in the bush was not a pleasant or easy undertaking, I was only able to see the plants in a very limited area in the time I had to look for them.  However, in the small patch I was able to explore I found many plants.  Happily I was even able to locate plants I had seen during a visit I made last year.  The variability of the flowers surprised me, one would expect that plants growing in such proximity of each other would have flowers that would look very similar.  But this was not the case.  Every parameter of the flowers seemed to show some degree of variation among the ones I photographed.  One thing I can attest, these plants are indeed quite successful at attracting pollinators, seedpods were everywhere.  Here are photos of some of the flowers I saw.

Psytonia Caribbean Jewels 'E Orchids Little Ruby' AM/AOS, a rare hybrid of Psychilis macconnelliae and Broughtonia sanguinea

This interesting plant is an hybrid of Psychilis macconnelliae (which was the seed parent) and Broughtonia sanguinea (which was the pollen parent).  It was registered in 2004 by J. R. Fernandez..  We can see that the influence of the Psychilis parent was overwhelming, you would have a hard time guessing which was the other parent from looking at this plant.  The color is highly reminiscent of Psychilis kraenzlinii, however the flower size and shape clearly distinguishes it from that species.  The white spot on the lip makes me suspect that the Puerto Rican plant of macconnelliae was used on this hybrid rather than a plant from St. Croix.  Hybrids with Psychilis are uncommon, in the ones that I have seen, the Psychilis influence is very dominant.

This hybrid was exhibited by Edwin Alberto Perez.  I want to thank Irma Saldana because she helped me find the information and parentage of this hybrid as registed on the Royal Horticultural Society.

Psychilis macconnelliae, from St. Croix in the Virgin Islands

In January of 2013 I had the pleasure to visit the island of Saint Croix.  I was invited by Edna Hamilton (the President of the St. Croix Orchid society), to talk about the culture of Dendrobium species and hybrids.  I took advantage of the occasion to see the forests and beaches of St. Croix.  This, of course, included looking out for orchid plants in bloom to photograph.   I had the pleasure to spend some time talking to Mike Evans the wildlife manager of the Sandy Point national wildlife refuge.  We know each other from pretty far back, in fact he worked for the Puerto Rican Parrot project (the project in which I work now) when it was starting back in the seventies.  I also met Rudy O’Reilly (President of the St. Croix Bonsai Society), which studied at the Mayaguez Campus of the University of Puerto Rico at the same time I was studying there.  But I digress, let’s go back to the orchids.

I saw a population of Psychilis macconnealliae growing on low bushes over sandy soil.  Most of the plants were growing a few inches over the sand, perching near the base of low bushes.  The condition of the plants was variable, the healthiest ones I found were growing on larger bushes and were not too close to the soil.  The larger plants were those that were sheltered from the sunlight by a layer of leaves that was not so dense as cast a deep shadow.  Plants growing exposed to full sunlight looked stunted and had lots of anthocyanin in the leaves giving them a reddish coloring.  I didn’t find any really big, multi-pseudobulb plants, but this is probably a consequence of the fact that my schedule only allowed me to see a small patch of their habitat. 

I visited their habitat in the morning so that I didn’t experience the worst of the heat and sunlight, but it is clear that the climatic and environmental conditions in which the plant grow in St. Croix is pretty much the same as that in which other Psychilis grow.   From looking at the way the plants grow in the wild I can assert with confidence that these orchids would surely die under the care of the average hobbyist.   I can think of nothing more lethal for these plants than putting them in a bark filled pot and keeping them slightly moist (a common recommendation about watering orchids on older orchid books).   By the way, I don’t collect wild orchids, I prefer to enjoy them in their natural habitat.  If you are doing botanical research on orchids and want access to plants of these species, I advise you contact Prof. Ackerman from the University of Puerto Rico.

Although, from time to time, you can see clones of Psychilis macconelliae exhibited in orchid shows in Puerto Rico, all the ones I have seen are from Vieques Island or from Puerto Rico.  The St, Croix Psy. macconnelliae is quite distinct in color and easily distinguished from them.  To me the form from Puerto Rico and the form St. Croix look more different from each other than Psychilis monensis and Psychilis krugii from Puerto Rico.  But this is work for a taxonomist, perhaps one day someone will look at this question.

Ponthieva ventricosa, first flower of the season.

  

This is the first flower of the winter season of the plants of  a patch of Ponthieva ventricosa plants I am monitoring in the wild.  The patch was being overshadowed by ferns.  I cleared away a few of the ferns so that the plants would get more sunshine, as a result the patch became healthier amd this year will produce its best blooming since I have been watching it.

Psychilis monensis some observations of plants "in situ"

This form has a flat open flower with green sepals and petals

Cream colored flowers

Yellowish nodding, slightly cupped flowers
 with lips whose sides curl back

Relatively shorter lip on green flower

An inflorescence with five open flowers

A very pale form with cupped sepals

Seed capsule

The orchid Psychilis monensis is endemic of the island of Mona.  Mona Island sits in the Mona channel which located is between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico.  Mona Island is a deserted island only inhabited by a few personnel of the department of natural and environmental resources of Puerto Rico.  It is visited by fishermen hunters and campers but lately, mainly due to a number of deaths on the island caused by sunstroke, dehydration and accidents, the number of visitors has reduced significantly.  Mona Island is part of the United States, it was ceded to the nation after the Hispano-American war along with Puerto Rico and other islands of the Puerto Rican Bank.

The main terrain in Mona Island is a flat limestone plateau mostly at an elevation of one to two hundred feet above the sea.  The island receives a comparatively low quantity of rain, 30 inches a year, and most of the vegetation is composed of drought resistant plants.  The limestone plateau is a particularly challenging place for plants to grow due the harsh conditions that prevail on it.   Most of the ground in the plateau consists of bare, rain eroded limestone, this terrain can severely damage even the most sturdy footwear faily quickly.  There are trees in the plateau but they are small and occur where there is a pocket of soil in the rocky terrain.  Sunlight is fierce and temperatures high which makes dehydration and sunstroke a constant threat.

In these surroundings, which not in the least resembles what most people think as the ideal orchid growing environment,  Psychilis monensis not only lives but thrives.   In certain parts of the islands plants are downright abundant.  I visited Mona Island in July 2012 and one of my goals was to see this orchid.  I went for a short walk to look for orchids about an hour before sunset, when temperatures are tolerable and sunlight is considerably reduced in intensity.  I found that in a particular area of low shrubs these orchids were exceedingly common.  Many shrubs had Psychilis growing in the middle of them, some of the plants were large specimens.  In the largest plants almost every pseudobulb had an inflorescence.

Psychilis plants were growing everywhere in this area, on the ground, on cacti, on dead or dying trees and on the bare rock.  However plants exposed all the time to full sun were stunted, with reddish leaves and few if any inflorescences.  Plants growing in soil seemed in worse shape than either those in bare rock or growing as epiphytes.  In fact a number of the plants that were located directly in contact with soil were dying or had dead parts.   The largest and healthiest plants were those located one or two feet over the ground on a shrub that shielded the plant from the worst of the midday sunlight and yet allowed a considerable amount of sunlight to pass through.

The flowers of Psy. monensis are surprisingly variable.  I heard a presentation where a student that had done some field research argued that this was due to the fact that they don’t give a reward to pollinators and they need to have variability so that potential pollinators won’t learn to avoid them before pollination is affected.   Unfortunately my camera stopped working on my second day in Mona so I have only a few photos of the flowers of this orchid, taken on a small area near the Sardine Beach.  Nevertheless I saw a bit of the variation that one can see in the whole island.  In the flowers I saw the floral parts could be short or long, perpendicular to the lip or almost parallel to it, green, pinkish white or pale yellow.  The lip could be richly colored, white, long, short, flat or with its sides recurved back.  Some flowers were nodding with the lip hanging straight down and others held the lip almost horizontal.  The inflorescences can bloom repeatedly, I saw one with evidence of having bloomed six or seven times.

No other orchid compares in abundance with Psychilis in Mona island.  You can find a few plants of Domingoa here and there, Oeceoclades in forested areas of the coast and Vanilla, Tolumnia and Broughtonia in particular locales in the interior of the island, but all of the previous orchids have a patchy distribution and, when compared to Psychilis, take an effort to find.  I have read accounts of orchid collectors from the eighteen and nineteen century that remark on finding orchids in the hundreds and even in the thousands growing all over the landscape.  In Mona Island you can still see a glimmer of how a pristine orchid population looked to those early explorers.

 Happily the orchids of Mona Island are pretty safe from human depredations and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.  The main thing that protects these orchids is that the average orchidist reaction to the flowers of Psychilis is probably “meh”.   The relatively small flowers of Psychilis can hardly compete, in the eyes of an average orchidist, with the very many brightly colored, large flowered hybrids that are currently the norm in the orchid market.  I know that visitors occasionally take plants, but this collecting doesn’t seem to make even the tiniest noticeable dent in this orchid population and must be very light indeed as you can find large plants at a few minute walk from the camping grounds, something that would not happen if any amount of collecting was happening as usually it is the largest and most handsome plants the ones that are collected first.  Without a doubt probably almost all of the plants that have been taken from the island have died.  In all my years of orchid growing I have only seen a single plant of Psychilis monensis growing successfully out of Mona Island.  It was twenty years ago in Cupey, in the garden of a non-orchidist that had tied the plant to a wooden post in his garden when he had arrived back from a visit to Mona and had subsequently given it absolutely no care or attention to it.  I have heard that there are a few plants in cultivation, but unlike Psy. kranzlinii, Psy. macconellia and Psy. krugi which show up regularly in orchid shows, I have yet to see a Psy.  monensis at a show.  My suspicion is that Psychilis monensis just can’t survive the way in which most orchidist treat their plants as it is radically different from what these plants experience in their natural habitat.

This Psychilis is so common in its habitat because it is supremely well adapted to conditions that few other plants can tolerate.   In the coastal areas of Mona, where conditions are much more moderate you are hard pressed to find plants of Psychilis growing anywhere.   These plants have adapted to high levels of sunlight, strong desiccating winds and weeks or even months without any measurable rain.    Move a plant such as this to a shady, humid spot with stagnant air where it gets drenched with water every two or three days and im all probably it won’t survive, particularly if its roots are buried in bark and kept wet all the time.  So my advice is simple, leave these plants in its natural habitat.

Large plant with many inflorescences

A common hazzard in Mona Island

Psychilis monensis inflorescenses can rebloom several times

Domingoa haematochila (Rchb. f.) Carabia 1943, in situ in Mona Island in the Caribbean

This flower opened in the morning after a spell of strong rain

A whole plant view.  This plant had five inflorecenses, two with flowers.

For many years, in the eighties and nineties, I used to visit Mona Island on a yearly basis.   One of the things that lured me to Mona was that it is full of many interesting species of plants and animals.   I was particularly intrigued by the orchids of Mona.  The environment of Mona Island is not one that most people would associate with orchids. 

Most of the island is a plateau composed of limestone.  Here and there are pockets of soil in which shrubs and trees eke out an existence but most of the surface is bare limestone.  Rainfall is seasonal and can be scant, weeks, sometimes months, can go without measurable rain.   Temperatures can rise over 100F out in the plateau, I still remember my surprise (on a previous visit) when a thermometer I carried with me on a walk during the hottest time of the day measured 120 F.   The dominant vegetation on the plateau is shrubs, cactus and low trees.  There are places where the limestone has eroded to the point that sunken depressions have formed and accumulated a layer of soil where more substantial trees can grow.  But almost all of these depressions are small.  One of the largest one, the Bajura de los Cerezos has large trees and is moister than the surrounding terrain.  Domingoa in Puerto Rico lives in this severe but beautiful environment.

The last time I visited Mona Island, around 1996, I found many stemmed plants of Domingoa in the moister environment of the “bajuras”.  I had also found plants in the hot and very sunny plateau, but those were much smaller and much less common than the ones in moister surroundings.   In particular I found a good sized plant within easy walking distance of the camping area.   Sadly, the photos I took of the plant at this time were not good.

I visited Mona again between the 20 and 24 of July of 2012.  It was a wonderful experience.  One of the first things I did was to seek out the Domingoa plant to see if still survived.   I went looking for the place where I had seen it last and sure enough the plants were there.  I was dismayed by the fact that all the plants I found had developing buds or spent flowers.  Not a single one had an open flower.  However, one of the nights there was a spell of rain, the next day I found an open flower.  The plant I found had five inflorescences, one with a newly opened flower another with a bud just opening and one with a tiny developing flower bud.

Unlike many orchids Domingoa is pretty secure from collecting pressures.  Most of the island is off-limits to visitors and, even in those places where hiking is allowed, high temperatures, fierce sunlight and hordes of mosquitos tend to keep away all but the very hardiest of hikers.  I don’t know if Domingoa plants are in cultivation on the island of PR, I don’t recall ever seen plants exhibited in local orchid shows.  Domingoa haematocheila is reported from Cuba, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. Ackerman in  his book An Orchid Flora of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands reports that the forms from Mona are vegetatively much smaller than the forms from Cuba.

Mona Island, cave pearls, circa 1984, AEB field trip.

These are cave pearls from a cave in the Island of Mona, a small island about fifty miles to the west of the Island of Puerto Rico.  Mona Island is composed of a huge slab of limestone that rose from the sea about a million years ago.  There are two types of limestone in Mona Island, caliza lirio, the top layer, is relatively easily dissolved by rain water, the bottom layer is dolomite which is harder and resists dissolucion by rain much better.  In the boundary between the two layers of limestone you get enormous caves which can have hundred of thousands of square meters of interior space.  The easiest caves to access are all around the coast of the island. Almost all were severely altered by man early last century to extract huge quantities of guano that were deposited in the caves in the past.  The caves in Mona Island are laberinthic with many side passages and cavities going in all directions and interconnecting in all sort of ways.  They are full of a large variety of stalagmites and other speleothems, some of which seem to defy gravity.  Cave pealrs can be found in large numbers in some of the caves but they are rarely as white and pristine as these ones.  As you can see they are not necessarily round, they can be square, triangular and irregularly polyhedral.  From the empty niches you can tell that some have been taken away from the cave.  These pearls have no commercial value and are best enjoyed in their natural setting.  Hopefully these ones are still in the cave where I saw them.