We, that’s Viki Wieser and Johan Urrea, have just finished two months of intense field work in Colombia, exploring the tribe Pyxidantheae and the ecology of these plants. We’ve travelled to the departments Boyacá, Antioquía, Valle del Cauca and Magdalena, and visited seven different sites to search for plants of the genera Blakea and Chalybea. To cover the diversity of species, morpholgies and interactions in this group, we picked places along the Cordillera Oriental and Occidental in the Andes and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. During our investigations we have encountered at least 6 undescribed species of Blakea, five of which in a wonderful reserve called El Tambo, near Frontino in Antioquía. We will describe them and publish a paper with all of the new species we’ve found.
For Johan’s research we recorded pollinators and collected scents, to gather as much ecological data to accompany the botanical collections. For Viktoria’s thesis we collected data from the so-called acarodomatia, structures in the leaf vein axils that harbour mites, hence the name acarodomatia. But what we found where also small insects living there as well as a few different mites. We also had the opportunity to visit a lot of local herbaria to deepen our understanding of the Pyxidantheae. We were able to work with Blakea and Chalybea specimens in the Herbario Nacional Colombiano (COL) and Herbario de la Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (HPUJ) in Bogotá, Herbario de la Universidad Antioquía (HUA) and Herbario del Jardín Botánico de Medellín “Joaquin Antonio Uribe” (JAUM) in Medellín and the Herbario de la Universidad El Valle (CUCV) in Cali. Overall it was a very successful field trip with lots of interesting data that we can’t wait to process further in the lab (i.e., DNA barcoding of mites, geometric morphometric measurements of flowers) and analyse!
(c) photos: Viki Wieser and Johan Urrea