Fog Deserts of Chile
Whenever I am botanizing an area, I usually end up taking hundreds of photos in a single day. This habit of mine started during a Psilocybe session sometime years ago while I was walking around a remote area of the Mojave Desert, looking for plants and rocks. As Psilocybe is, generally speaking, an incredible “sensitizer”, it made me much more aware then I otherwise would have been of subtle nuances of not just the floral and vegetative morphology of plants, but also of subtle nuances in the landscape. In many ways, it helped to make me a better and more astute observer. At the end of that day, I realize I had taken upwards of 500 photos of what was a small area of land. I rarely botanize under the influence of Psilocybe anymore, but I have found that that experience started a habit that was an otherwise invaluable tool for learning plants and learning a landscape to me - take tons of photos, even if they are of things that you initially may not find much interest in. Later on, when you are referencing those photos - perhaps even years into the future - they may teach you things that you initially did not notice or pay attention to.
I bring this up because tonight I was looking at some of the pictures of coastal Northern Chile that I took during a single afternoon when I was down there in late 2019. To see massive organ-pipe-like arrays of Eulychnia taltalensis, covered in what had to easily be 12 or 13 different species of lichen, is something I grateful I took enough photos of to be able to study again in retrospect. Species featured here are, in order from Left to Right - Oxalis gigantea, Oxalis caesia, Chaetanthera glabrata, Eulychnia taltalensis, Paposoa laeta (formerly Rhodophiala pratensis. Amaryllidaceae), Trichocereus deserticola, Loasa nitida, Copiapoa gigantea.
SPeaking of ENDOPARASITES…
Inspired by the last post, I realized I might as well post photos of another, unrelated endoparasite from Chile. Tristerix aphyllus is a member of the tropical mistletoe family, Loranthaceae. Loranthaceae is a really cool family of parasites and hemiparasites that occurs worldwide at lower latitudes. Australia has some really cool members of this family, most notably a tree-sized parasite known as Nuytsia floribunda, known as a christmas parasite because it flowers around Christmas time (the Southern Hemisphere summer). But again, we’re talking endoparasitism here and that’s what makes Tristerix so remarkable. This plant spends 99% of it’s life living inside it’s host, which are cacti in the genera Trichocereus (specifically Trichocereus chiloensis) and Eulychnia). As the flowers are tube-shaped and red, it is obvious that hummingbirds are their main pollinators, which is not surprising because hummingbirds are extremely species-rich in the “new world” (both North and South America). Tristerix is a genus of roughly 14 species, but most are not endoparasites. Further, not only are other species of Tristerix not endoparasites, but they are hemiparasites, meaning they produce leaves with chlorophyll in them and can produce some of their own carbohydrates (food) via photosynthesis (so they are, in effect, only partially parasitic).
Endoparasites I have KNown : Pilostyles thurberi (cucurbitales)
Pilostyles thurberi might be one of the most bizarre plants (I know I say that shit all the time - there are a lot of bizarre plants) in North America. It spends 99% of it’s life living INSIDE another plant, only emerging to flower. This is a characteristic called being “endoparasitic”, and my only other experience with an endoparasite was the plant Tristerix aphylla which is an endoparasite of columnar cacti in the genera Trichocereus and Eulychnia in Chile.
When Pilostyles decides it is time to flower, little clusters of tiny mahogany flowers with white interiors burst out of the epidermal tissue of the host plant. In the case of the plant I saw in West Texas, the host plant was Dalea frutescens but Pilostyles can also parasitize the genus Psorothamnus or a few other plants in the tribe Amorpheae of the Pea Family, Fabaceae.
It was long thought that Pilostyles was related to another parasitic plant, the genus Rafflesia which occurs in humid jungles of Southeast Asia, yet DNA sequencing later proved this to not be the case. It turns out that Pilostyles is more closely related to cucumbers and squash (order Cucurbitales) than it is to Rafflesia. Pilostyles thurberi is dioecious, so individual plants either produce male or female flowers. At this particular remote location in Sutton County, Texas, there seemed to be 4 or 5 individual plants in a single, small population of Dalea frutescens.
As far as the genus itself, whats equally bizarre is its distribution - there are 11 species of Pilostyles (with a new one being described in Colombia) and they are widespread. Australia has its own Pilostyles species as does the Middle East, reportedly. How exactly does a genus become so widespread? Is it just an old lineage that evolved before continental drift had placed the continents at their current location? Was it dispersed by some now extinct bird sometime relatively recently (ie the last ten million years)? And how does Pilostyles get around and what do the fruits look like and how do they germinate on the host plant? Does the host plant suffer any ill effects as a result of the parasite (most hosts here appeared to be robust despite the drought and despite being infected with Pilostyles)? Is it possible to cultivate Pilostyles if you’re already growing the host plant? How did something like this evolve (ie were there a specific set of environmental conditions or mutations that made parasitism more adaptive then just doing what most successful plants do - growing prodigiously and producing abundant fruit?
These are the paths my mind always goes down when my curiosity descends on a new taxon. There are so many questions to ask and every answer will seemingly only open up ten more questions.
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