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Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter
from the July 9, 2017 Newsletter issued from Rancho Regenesis in the woods ±4kms west of Ek Balam Ruins; elevation ~40m (~130 ft), N20.876°, W88.170°; north-central Yucatán, MÉXICO
YUCATAN ECHITES FLOWERING
For a couple of weeks a certain viny member of the big Dogbane Family, the Apocynaceae, has been a conspicuous presence twining up trees and producing pretty clusters of white flowers that caused nothing less than visual explosions in the current landscape's dark greenness. Below, you can see the vine's flowers and leaves:
In that picture notice how the slender flower buds as well as the open flowers twist. Below, a single flower with its five corolla lobes creating a spiraling effect is shown
Breaking open a flower lengthwise, we see a typical Dogbane-Family flower structure with the stamens inserted at the mouth of the corolla and bearing long, sharp-pointed, arrowhead-shaped anthers surrounding the dark green, spherical stigma head, as shown below:
This is another species so poorly represented on the Internet that identifying it was hard. A few dried herbarium specimens are posted online, and here and there distant views of blossoms are provided, but that wasn't much. The main help was the Flora de la Península de Yucatán website sponsored by CICY, the Center for Scientific Investigation of the Yucatan, located in Mérida, where I found a list of all the species of the Dogbane Family known to exist in the Yucatan, and looked at pictures of each one. And with this approach it was more a matter of elimination of all species except one, and that one wasn't well illustrated.
With that sloppy, time-consuming approach, I became about 95% sure that our handsome vine is ECHITES YUCATANENSIS, native from southern Mexico south to Nicaragua. Little is known about it. I think our pictures posted with this Newsletter will be of value to future researchers.
from the March 15, 2019 Newsletter issued from Rancho Regenesis in the woods ±4kms west of Ek Balam Ruins; elevation ~40m (~130 ft), N20.876°, W88.170°; north-central Yucatán, MÉXICO
YUCATAN ECHITES' STRANGE FRUITS
Down in the abandoned papaya orchard, about 25ft up a tree (8m), something new and somewhat weird looking turned up dangling from a dry-season-leafless branch, as shown below:
At first I thought it was a disease-caused witch's broom, but the swollen nodes along the dangling items seemed too regularly spaced for that. With the telephoto lens a picture was taken, then later on the computer enlarged, so that certain interesting details showed up, as seen below:
Notice that each dangling thing is one of a pair arising from a common base. I interpreted this as double fruits issuing from a dried-up calyx of an earlier flower containing two pistils. When such a configuration is encountered, the first plant family to come to mind should be the big Dogbane or Oleander Family, the Apocynaceae, which produces many vines that might twine into a treetop. Moreover, in the picture, notice that at the far right the fruit is splitting lengthwise to reveal something cottony white. In the Apocynaceae, often seeds are wind-dispersed by means of long, white, feathery hairs atop them behaving like parachutes, so we must be seeing that. Higher up some older fruits already had released their seeds, plus a few green leaves were visible, shown below:
There, the right-most fruit contains a seed ready to fly away. Here we can easier interpret the fruits' swollen nodes as holding seed bodies, while the white hairs were cramped into the narrow parts.
In that picture it wasn't clear whether the leaves belonged to the vine or the otherwise leafless tree. However, they looked identical to leaves on a viny member of the Apocynaceae we've already look at here, when flowering, what I call the Yucatan Echites, Echites yucatenensis {above entry}.
In 2017 when that identification was made, so little information and so few pictures were available on the Internet that I identified the species by the sloppy process of elimination, and wasn't sure of the ID. Now that these fruits have turned up, and fit the description for the species, and because more information and pictures are available, I'm more confident.
Also, now I read that among the Maya in the Yucatan, traditionally the roots of Echites yucatenensis were mashed, ice and lemon juice were added, and the pulp applied to the bite.