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Manual de Plantas de Costa Rica

Main | Family List (MO) | Family List (INBio) | Cutting Edge
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The Cutting Edge

Volume XXII, Number 4, October 2015

News and Notes | Leaps and Bounds | Germane Literature | Season's Pick | Annotate your copy

HYDROCHARITACEAE. We have overlooked a paper by Kuo & Wilson (2008; Aquatic Bot. 88: 178–180) that clarified the nomenclature of Halophila baillonis Asch. According to the interpretations of those authors, the sp. heading for H. baillonis in the Manual (Vol. 2) should be amended to "en Hook. f.," rather than "en Dickie."

STERCULIACEAE. Only six months off the presses, and already a major snafu in Manual Vol. 8 to report! It would appear that, due to multiple and compounding errors by several parties, the measurements provided for the fruiting carpels of all four spp. of Sterculia are too low by an order of magnitude. For example: the expression "Folículos 0.8–0.9 × 0.4–0.5 cm" in the description of Sterculia apetala (Jacq.) H. Karst. should instead read "Folículos 8–9 × 4–5 cm." It took the sharp eyes of our colleague Daniel Santamaría to discover this transgression. As far as we can tell, the problem does not extend to other organs in the genus Sterculia, nor to other genera of Sterculiaceae.

URTICACEAE. Recent annotations on specimens returned from loan indicate that the taxon treated in Manual Vol. 8 (2015) as Pourouma bicolor Mart. subsp. scobina (Benoist) C. C. Berg & Heusden is to be elevated to sp. rank—as P. scobina Benoist—in an impending revision of its genus by one André Luiz Gaglioti (SP).

VITACEAE. Former MO colleague and ongoing Manual correspondent Paul Foster, now resident in Costa Rica, has called our attention to the omission of the name Cissus pseudofuliginea Lombardi from the Manual Vitaceae treatment (2015). While this sp. was not reported from Central America in Lombardi's Flora neotropica monographs treatment of Cissus (2000), the same cannot be said of his Flora mesoamericana account (2015). However, C. pseudofuliginea was not included in the draft of the latter (dated 2010) that we referenced while editing the Manual treatment, so this must have been a last-minute decision on Lombardi's part. That said, we were, at one point—and in plenty of time to have addressed the matter in the Manual treatment—aware of Lombardi's change of heart, one of your editors (MHG) having entered Lombardi's dets. of Costa Rican specimens as C. pseudofuliginea into TROPICOS in 2009 and added the name to the La Selva Flórula Digital checklist—which is where Paul encountered it! So we have been the instrument of our own downfall. As to the author of our Vitaceae treatment, Francisco Morales (UBT): circumstantial evidence suggests that his "Cissus sp. A" equates to C. pseudofuliginea, which would mean that the taxon (if not the name) was honored in the Manual. But some mysteries remain, in particular, the fact that C. sp. A is restricted by Chico to the Pacific slope (Península de Osa), while all the Costa Rican specimens det. as C. pseudofuliginea in TROPICOS are from the Atlantic slope. It may be that the taxonomic concepts of the two authors differ in some manner; but even in that case, we ought to have cited the name C. pseudofuliginea somewhere, if only as a "sensu" synonym. Some things inevitably fall between the cracks.

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