Photo: OSLAN RAHMAN/AFP/Getty Images
By: The opinion Posted Mar 29, 2023, 0:21 am EDT
The carnivorous plants They are usually impressive because it is difficult to see one of these beings feeding on another living being and recently botanists found two new species of carnivorous plants.
A team of botanists from Ecuador, Germany and the United States have described two new species of carnivorous plants amazing looking. They are part of the butterworts (genus Pinguicula), a group of flowering plants with about 115 species that can trap and digest small insects with their sticky leaves.
The carnivorous plants use animals (usually small insects) as an additional source of nutrients to compensate for the deficiency of the substrate in which they grow. This gives them a competitive advantage over other plants and allows them to thrive in difficult habitats. The tropical High Andes present a great variety of habitats of this type, for example swamps and rocky slopes covered by constant rains and clouds.
While most species of butterwort are distributed in the northern hemisphere, eThese new species were discovered in the high Andes southern Ecuador, near the border with Peru.
The two new species described in the study, Pinguicula jimburensis and Pinguicula ombrophila, were found on the shore of a lagoon at 3,400 m and on an almost vertical rock face at 2,900 m, respectively. Their small-scale habitats are found in the so-called Amotape-Huancabamba zone, which covers large portions of southern Ecuador and northern Peru.
vulnerable species
“Are two new species are only known from a single locality, where only a few dozen individuals of the plant occur in each case,” says lead author Tilo Henning of the Leibniz Center for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), who is a specialist in this family of plants in this region. His colleague Álvaro Pérez, from the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador, and his team were the first to discover plants. So they contacted Henning.
In the case of one of them, only one population with about 15 mature individuals was discovered, which makes it vulnerable even if it is hidden in an isolated area and difficult to access. This narrow endemism (limited distribution in a particular area) is typical of the Amotape-Huancabamba zone, and there are many more new species of plants and animals waiting to be discovered, Henning says.
With the description of these two new species, the number of Pinguicula species registered in Ecuador has tripled, since previously only P. calyptrata was known, discovered by none other than Alexander von Humboldt. The authors are convinced that there are many more new species awaiting scientific recognition formal, but admit it’s been a race against time lately.
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