mudboots

I just posted in the dallas club forum about a field visit I need to make to an area that is not generally open to the public. See that thread for details; it's titled the same as this one.

davemonkey

Anyone who has a day available for a day-trip (see the DFW post for more details)...I highly recommend this trip. The sites are not open to the general public, as they are well within the experiment center for the university. The sites mudboots is talking about offer wonderful education on wetland ecology, as well as some rare plants and aquatic animals.

Cavan Allen

If the Ludwigia is in flower or fruit, be sure to take lots of good photos and makea few specimens. You should be able to find L. sphaerocarpa too, and there's a distinct possibility that what we're calling L. pilosa may be a hybrid of the two. They are closely related and frequently hybridize; such hybrids have even been found in that area.

mudboots

Kevin is meeting me out there as well, so he'll have a good quality camera more than likely.

mudboots

The trip went well and I was able to ID evrything so far for the wetland training for the purposes of that course, which is focused on process and not on plant ID. Unfortunately, every Ludwigia (5 sps.) we came across had identifying characteristics of flower/fruit EXCEPT the L.pilosa candidate...go figure.

I thought about being a smart-alec and merging a photo of Rhexia mariana in bloom with the L.pilosa stem, but figured that'd just be too obnoxious, so I resisted the temptation...

Anyway, the trip was great, we tromped in lots of shallow water, and I am looking forward to the training coming up in August.

davemonkey

The L.pilosa should be flowering when you go for the training next month. The flowers will not be conspicuous (no petals)...hopefully they will have hard seed that you can use to ID for sure.

mudboots

Anyone have a spare tank? I could collect several Ludwigia sps and the Gratiola that I think is G.virginiana. My picotope is too short to grow specimens out and my spare 10 is now the pico's sump.

Maybe I can rip something out of my wetland and put some of those in there. Does Justicia grow submersed???

davemonkey

The Justicia can, but it was not very impressive when I tried it...very leggy.

Cavan Allen

The flowers WILL be conspicuous. There are no petals, but if what you seek really is pilosa, it will have showy white sepals.

davemonkey

Hmm. Then I'm almost certain that the first plant I collected (the one from Chambers County, not Nacogdoches County) was not pilosa. Maybe it was the hybrid or simply L. sphaerocarpa? I no longer have access to that particular site though.