Fabian A. Michelangeli, Ph.D, is an Associate Curator of the Institute of Systematic Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. His research focuses in part on the evolution, identification, and classification of neotropical plants.
In this last post about Cuban Johnny berries and meadow beauties, I want to show some of the species found in the northeastern part of the island. The mountain ranges in this area—the Sierra de Moa, Baracoa, Nipe and Cristal—are all rich in minerals and have unique soils that contain high concentrations of metals. These metals are toxic for many plants, but this plant family, the Melastomataceae, has adapted to these conditions.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Calycogonium glabratum, Miconia baracosensis, Miconia uninervis, Ossaea moensis, and Ossaea puciflora are not closely related, but they have all evolved small, hard leaves as an adaptation to the high toxicity of the soils they inhabit.
Michael J. Balick, Ph.D., is Vice President for Botanical Science at The New York Botanical Garden and Director and Philecology Curator of the Botanical Garden’s Institute of Economic Botany. For more than 30 years, he has studied the relationship between plants and people, working with traditional cultures in tropical, subtropical, and desert environments around the world.
All of the scientists at The New York Botanical Garden have stories to tell about our work, our travels, and the people we meet along the way. I’ve had the opportunity to tell some of my stories and provide lessons about the importance of nature and botanical research in a new book,Rodale’s21st Century Herbal: A Practical Guide for Healthy Living Using Nature’s Most Powerful Plants.
Rodale’s 21st Century Herbal, from the publisher of Organic Gardening and many other health and wellness magazines, is written from the perspective of ethnobotany, the study of the relationship between plants and people.
My goal was to tell the story of how plants have been used as medicines, foods, spices, dyes, cosmetics, and other things from our earliest days as a species to the present day, with the current explosion of interest in gardening, herbal medicine, and different dietary patterns.
In my last post I recounted how my colleagues and I explored eastern Cuba, collecting different members of the family Melastomataceae. Only a dozen species in this group, which includes plants known as meadow beauties, princess flowers and Johnny berries, are found in the United States, but it is very diverse in the tropics. In Cuba, there are more than 200 species of Melastomataceae, and more than 150 of those are endemic, found only on that island.
Here are some representatives from the Sierra Maestra Mountains that we encountered on our expedition. Most of these species are adapted to the cloud forest conditions of the mountains.
William R. Buck, Ph.D., is the Mary Flagler Cary Curator of Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. Every January for the past three years, Dr. Buck, a moss specialist, and a team of colleagues have journeyed to the Cape Horn region at the southern tip of South America to document the area’s rich diversity of mosses and search for new species. This is the last in his series of posts about his 2014 field trip.
The trip is all but over. We arrived in Punta Arenas at midnight between the 27th and 28th, almost a day early. I asked Ernesto Davis to phone ahead and see if our hotel reservation could be updated. After a rough night the day before, everyone was ready for stable beds and hot showers. Fortunately, the hotel had space and our rooms were ready when we arrived, luggage in hand.
We returned to the ship early the next morning to gather our collections. The entire crew was in attendance when we arrived at the trusty Doña Pilar. We still had specimens on the dryers and promptly started dealing with them. There was little wind, so I was able to close up my paper bags on the deck. Every last one of my collections was completely dry. Everyone else still had damp specimens that would need additional time before being packed up.
Early in the expedition, I asked the crew if, after our trip, I might have the small Magellanic flag that the Doña Pilar flew. Ships on previous expeditions only flew the Chilean flag, which I asked for and received during our last trip. Perhaps they hadn’t flown the Magellanic flag because the captain was from further north, in Chiloé. Regardless, I was delighted when this year’s captain presented me with the tattered flag that had flown over the ship that had served us so well. I collect flags, in part as a true souvenir of my collecting localities. Some hold special memories. I will proudly display this one in my New York office.
William R. Buck, Ph.D., is the Mary Flagler Cary Curator of Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. Every January for the last three years, Dr. Buck, a moss specialist, and a team of colleagues have journeyed to the Cape Horn region at the southern tip of South America to document the area’s rich diversity of mosses and search for new species.
Time has lost meaning. We’re on the long trek back to Punta Arenas now, which is supposed to take about a day and a half. We arrived in Puerto Williams two nights ago (could it really have been only two nights ago?). We transferred ashore for one of those nights and stayed in the Universidad de Magallanes house. Our top priorities were hot showers and dealing with leftover specimens—in that order.
We went to dinner at the only restaurant in town that could handle a group of nine people. This was to be Rina Charlín’s last meal with us since she was staying behind in Puerto Williams. Fortunately, our prior arrangements were successful, and we surprised Matt von Konrat at the end of the meal with a cake for his 10th wedding anniversary. He seemed genuinely touched and took a photo of himself with the cake to send to his wife in Chicago.
After cake, Matt and Laura Briscoe hurried back to the university house for a late night of photographing oil-bodies, the distinctive, oil-filled structures found in the cells of most hepatics, or liverworts. It’s important to photograph them quickly because they disintegrate when the plant dries out. Matt and Laura didn’t get to bed until nearly 4 a.m. The final tally for the number of oil-bodies photographed this year is 140. This will be an amazing addition to a flora of a remote area of the world. I was also pleased to hear that one of the small hepatics I picked up proved interesting and unusual.
William R. Buck, Ph.D., is the Mary Flagler Cary Curator of Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. Every January for the last three years, Dr. Buck, a moss specialist, and a team of colleagues have journeyed to the Cape Horn region at the southern tip of South America to document the area’s rich diversity of mosses and search for new species.
The expansive face of Isla Grevy’s “Low Peninsula”
Two nights ago we pulled into Caleta Antuca (55°42’S, 67°26’W), our final collecting site on Isla Wollaston. We tied off on the rocks and stepped directly ashore. This was fortunate because the wind was blowing strongly and it would have been difficult to get the Zodiac off the deck. Nevertheless, it was a little scary stepping from the rolling ship onto a small rock ledge. Both Barb Andreas and Barbara Murray chose to stay aboard because of this.
The wind howled, but precipitation was minimal. I found mosses around the shore of a lake. From time to time, as I searched around the base of rock ledges, I’d take a brief hiatus from the wind but otherwise gloried in the weather.
William R. Buck, Ph.D., is the Mary Flagler Cary Curator of Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. Every January for the last three years, Dr. Buck, a moss specialist, and a team of colleagues have journeyed to the Cape Horn region at the southern tip of South America to document the area’s rich diversity of mosses and search for new species.
After leaving Fondeadero Hyde yesterday, we headed east to the next bay over, Fondeadero Kendall (55°45’S, 67°23’W). I had collected there some years prior, and so I headed to a different side of the bay with Barb Andreas, following a stream uphill to a series of lakes. We were searching for a submerged moss, Blindia inundata, attached to pebbles in the lake. In short order we found it and headed back to be picked up.
We needed to make our pick-up on time because Barb wanted to be dropped off at a site where I had collected several years ago. Just last year, she published a scientific description of one of my prior moss collections from this spot, naming it Blindia buckii. As she returned to the ship in the Zodiac later on, she gave me two thumbs up, and I knew she had been successful in locating it.
From there, we were told we had to travel four or five hours to reach our night anchorage on the north coast of Isla Wollaston. We arrived in about two and a half hours. As we traveled down the bay, the forests of southern beeches on the slopes of the mountains formed a reticulate pattern of dark green leaves among pale brown trunks. It was then that I noticed that the ship was headed straight for a solid rock cliff. Rock walls towered 50 feet above us on either side.
William R. Buck, Ph.D., is the Mary Flagler Cary Curator of Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. Every January for the last three years, Dr. Buck, a moss specialist, and a team of colleagues have journeyed to the Cape Horn region at the southern tip of South America to document the area’s rich diversity of mosses and search for new species.
Yesterday, the weather was surprisingly good—no rain the entire day. The problem was that it allowed us to hit three sites, meaning we fell behind on our work in the drying room. The ship started up at 4 a.m. for a bright and early arrival at our island du jour: Isla Deceit. I had never collected there, meaning I needed to collect every species of moss that I came across to document distribution.
A rainbow appears near a family farm near Moa in the province of Holguin
A recent expedition to eastern Cuba took three Cuban colleagues and me from the coast to the cloud forests in search of rare and locally restricted species in the plant family known as princess flower or meadow beauty. The species in this family (whose scientific name is Melastomataceae) are an especially diverse group in Cuba.
Joining me were Dr. Eldis Becquer from the Jardin Botanico Nacional (National Botanical Garden) in Havana; Wilder Carmenate, director of the Holguin Botanical Garden; and Jose Luis Gomez, a researcher at the Holguin garden and a graduate student at the University of Havana. Becquer, Carmenate and I are studying the Melastomataceae while Gomez and Carmenate took advantage of this expedition to document invasive species—part of ongoing research projects developed by Carmenate to study threats to the flora of Cuba.
The first area we targeted was the Turquino National Park in the Sierra Maestra Mountains of southeastern Cuba. This park contains some of the best-preserved cloud forests in the Caribbean, as well as the Pico Turquino, the tallest mountain on the island at almost 6,500 feet. During five days spent in the area, we reached the summit of three of the highest points in Cuba—Picos Turquino, Joaquin, and Regino—and we collected plants on both the southern, Caribbean-facing slope and the northern, inland-facing slope of the Sierra Maestra. This allowed us to contrast different exposures to rain and sun, as well as different soil types and vegetation.
Every year around Earth Day, many people wonder if there is anything they can do that will make a difference in the effort to understand and preserve our environment. Of course there is! There are all kinds of volunteer projects for all sorts of interests. Here at The New York Botanical Garden, for instance, volunteers are helping us make a critical part of our scientific collection available online so researchers everywhere can have easy access to the information.
The William and Lynda Steere Herbarium is taking part in a citizen-scientist transcription project called Notes from Nature, which enlists volunteers to help make the contents of the world’s biological collections accessible to the public through the Internet. Notes from Nature is part of Zooniverse, which has enlisted volunteers to look for new planets and transcribe climate data from ships’ logs. Notes from Nature is celebrating its first anniversary this week and also an important milestone: its volunteers have completed a half million transcriptions!
