S. flava variants and P. ionantha in situ, Liberty Co, FL

[meizwang]

Here's a site that we didn't get shot at thankfully! Notice how the plants here are very sparse and not densely packed like at other sites. My impression is that this population is a lot younger than other places we visited. The good news is there were lots of seedlings and the site was definitely burned in the past year or two. When it's easy to walk through the field and the grasses aren't knee high, you know it's being managed/burned:


Unlike the main rubricorpora site, this site had a mixture of variants, with S. flava var. rugelii being the dominant type:


Another shot: if you look carefully, this field is loaded with Drosera filiformis:


This field went on for days, we eventually had to stop exploring because it kept going on forever:



And now let's examine some individuals, starting with the S. flava var. rugelii's. Gosh, so many clones out in this field that are stunning. This may be a common plant, but the slight variation from one individual to the next is endless:






Skinny neck:




This one has a huge lid. Notice how there's only one trap per growth point (I'm guessing all of these traps are from the same clone), despite the fact that this plant is getting blazing full sun. Perhaps the insect population was slim this year and last year, so the plant ran out of energy after the first trap was produced in the spring. I've seen this same growth pattern happen in cultivation as well: the plant will produce one gigantic trap and that's it. The next year, it'll produce a bunch small to medium sized traps, and the following year, it'll again produce one giant:



Hard to tell the scale of things, but here's the same plant. This lid is gigantic:



These plants barely caught anything this year. In previous years, they were filled almost to the top:


Now what the hay is going on here? We determined it's something environmental because there were normal rugelii traps on this exact plant:


Mechanical damage can cause plants to produce anthocyanins that they would otherwise not produce. I wonder if this trap cooked in the blistering heat one day, or got rained on so hard that there were microscopic lesions on the trap which caused the plant to do this? If so, why was there only 2-3 plants in this entire field that produced these red pigments on otherwise pure yellow plants? Still not sure what's going on here:


But whatever it is, it's absolutely beautiful:



some neat ornatas:






This one has a slight bronze background color:



Closer shot:




One last shot of the same plant:



and now a different plant that has nice veining under the lid:




dark veins on the top:



Almost not an ornata:



We also saw some fat Pinguicula ionantha here, the populations was very healthy and we saw a lot of babies everywhere. Not sure if I snapped photos of the babies, but here are some of the big clumps:













Top view of the lid:




Notice other traps on the same plant aren't red. The production of red anthocyanins is directly correlated with mechanical damage to the leaf:



And before I go, check out this cute little walking stick!