Mountain papaya

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Mountain papaya
Mountain papaya (Vasconcellea pubescens) .jpg

Mountain papaya ( Vasconcellea pubescens )

Systematics
Rosids
Eurosiden II
Order : Cruciferous (Brassicales)
Family : Melon trees (Caricaceae)
Genre : Vasconcellea
Type : Mountain papaya
Scientific name
Vasconcellea pubescens
A.DC.

The mountain papaya ( Vasconcellea pubescens ), also called Papayuela , Chamburo and ( English mountain pawpaw, mountain papaya ) is a species of the genus Vasconcellea within the melon tree family (Caricaceae).

description

Mountain papaya is an upright shrub or small tree with a height of between 1.5 and 7 meters. The leaves are five to seven-lobed, with pointed to short pointed tips. They are densely hairy on the nerves on the underside, the top is bald. The petiole is also hairy.

Both monoecious as well as dioecious individuals occur. As in all species of the genus, the flowers are five-fold. The paniculate male inflorescences are axillary with a 4 to 14 centimeter long, slender stem. Their length is 24 to 27 millimeters. The calyx is about 3 millimeters, the greenish tube 12 to 15 millimeters long with five corolla lobes. The sterile female plant (pistillode) is about half as long as the corolla tube. The ( cauliflower ) female inflorescences sitting on the trunk are four- to six-flowered and have short stems, the stalk reaches 0.7 to 1 centimeter in length. The flowers are stalked 1 to 4 millimeters long, the calyx reaches 2 to 4 millimeters, the petals 20 to 25 millimeters in length. They are white or yellow in color, occasionally a little greenish. The ovary is smooth, the stylus is very short, the five stigmas are 3 to 7 millimeters long, their edge margined or entire. The fruits reach 6 to 15 centimeters in length and 3 to 8 centimeters in diameter, they are elliptical to obovate, often more or less pentagonal. The spindle-shaped seeds reach 4 to 5 millimeters in length, the seed coat has rounded outgrowths.

Depending on the season, the dioecious, separate-sexed plant specimens form male and female flowers as well as hermaphroditic flowers in different proportions, normally the female flowers are arranged on the inflorescences in the upper area and the male flowers in the lower area. The fruits, which weigh about 130 grams, are first green, then yellow or orange when they are ripe. The approximately 1 centimeter thick, fleshy, yellow, rubbery, somewhat sour and fragrant "pulp" surrounds a "cavity" with numerous brown-red seeds (100 to 200), which are covered with a whitish, juicy sarcotesta . The fruits of the female plants are regularly shaped, with more pulp and are preferred, the fruits of the hermaphrodite plants are deformed, with more pronounced five-sidedness, with less pulp.

Foliage leaves
Mountain papaya fruit

The habitus of the mountain papaya is similar to that of ordinary papaya , but it is smaller.

Occurrence

It is indigenous in Panama , Venezuela, Colombia , Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia . In other countries, such as Chile , it was introduced as a cultivated plant and has partly become wild, probably before the arrival of the Europeans. From here fruits are exported, on a small scale, to Europe and North America. A distribution map is given in the paper by Xavier Scheldeman and colleagues.

Natural places of growth are cloud forests and cloud forests of the Andean chains at sea levels above 1500 to about 3000 meters.

Taxonomy

It is a taxonomically problematic species. It was first described in 1864 by Alphonse Pyrame de Candolle in Prodromus systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis 15, p. 419. The generic name is derived from Simão de Vasconcellos , a Brazilian Jesuit who lived in the 17th century. Later it was temporarily transferred to the genus Carica by Hermann zu Solms-Laubach . He overlooked the fact that Peter Joseph Lenné and Karl Heinrich Koch had already described a Carica pubescens based on material sent to them by Józef Warszewicz . The Venezuelan botanist Víctor Manuel Badillo noted the homonymy in his revision of the group, in which he brought the genus Vasconcellea back out of synonymy . Since he no herbarium of de Candolle was present, he chose for Carica pubescens Lenne & K. Koch replacement name Vasconcellea cundinamarcensis V.M.Badillo (as corrected misspelling, according Cundinamarca derived from Carica candamarcensis , one of Joseph Dalton Hooker mentioned in a catalog name). In fact, later control showed that the characteristics of the plants were identical, so that the introduced name Vasconcellea pubescens is taxonomically valid. The resulting confusion continues to some extent to this day, so that the species can be mentioned under both names in numerous papers.

The species Vasconcellea pubescens , Vasconcellea longiflora , Vasconcellea stipulata and Vasconcellea goudotiana can hardly be differentiated from one another by means of overlapping combinations of characteristics in a purely morphological comparison of vegetative characteristics. According to genetic data, however, these are separate species.

In addition, plants designated and cultivated as mountain papaya do not always refer to this species, but sometimes also to other generic representatives. Often a species is grown, often called "Babaco", which is botanically called Vasconcellea × Heilbornii (V. Badillo) V. Badillo . According to Víctor Manuel Badillo, this is a naturally occurring hybrid between Vasconella pubescens and Vasconella stipulata . However, genetic investigations showed a more complex history, according to which other species must have been involved in the development of this clan, in some specimens no genetic markers of Vasconella pubescens were found at all . Vasconcellea × heilbornii has been cultivated in numerous regions, including New Zealand , Australia , South Africa, and southern Europe.

Phylogeny

The genus Vasconcellea is the most species-rich genus of the Caricaceae, it comprises about 20 species. According to the genetic data, the sister species is the (endangered) Ecuadorian species Vasconcellea sprucei .

literature

  • Odilo Duarte, Robert Paull: Exotic Fruits and Nuts of the New World. CABI, 2015, ISBN 978-1-78064-505-6 , pp. 202-206.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Fernanda Antunes Carvalho: Molecular phylogeny, biogeography, and an e-monograph of the papaya family (Caricaceae) as an example of taxonomy in the electronic age. Dissertation, Faculty of Biology at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, 2014. Description on pages 95 to 98, urn : nbn: de: bvb: 19-167498 (PDF; 38.00 MB), Springer, 2013, ISBN 978-3 -658-10266-1 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-658-10267-8 .
  2. ↑ María Angélica Salvatierra-González, Constanza Jana-Ayala: Floral expression and pollen germination ability in productive mountain papaya (Vasconcellea pubescens A.DC.) orchards. In: Chilean J. Agric. Res. Volume 76, No.2, (2016), ISSN  0718-5839 , doi : 10.4067 / S0718-58392016000200001 .
  3. ↑ J. Luza, A. Lizana, T. Fichet: Comparison of fruit and flowers from female and hermaphrodite papaya plants (Carica pubescens Lenné et Koch) grown commercially in Chile. In: Proceedings of the Interamerican Society for Tropical Horticulture. 1990, Vol. 34, 131-137, Ref. 11.
  4. ↑ a b c Bart Van Droogenbroeck, T. Kyndt, E. Romeijn-Peeters, W. Van Thuyne, P: Goetghebeur, JP Romero-Motochi, G. Gheysen: Evidence of Natural Hybridization and Introgression between Vasconcellea Species (Caricaceae) from Southern Ecuador Revealed by Chloroplast, Mitochondrial and Nuclear DNA Markers. In: Annals of Botany. 97 (5): (2006), 793-805, doi : 10.1093 / aob / mcl038 .
  5. ^ Basilio Carrasco, Patricio Avila, Jorge Perez-Diaz, Patricio Muñoz, Rolando Garcia, Blas Lavandero, Andres Zurita-Silva. Jorge B. Retamales, Peter DS Caligari: Genetic structure of highland papayas (Vasconcellea pubescens (Lenne et C. Koch) Badillo) cultivated along a geographic gradient in Chile as revealed by Inter Simple Sequence Repeats (ISSR). In: Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution. 56 (3): (2009), 331-337, doi : 10.1007 / s10722-008-9367-1 .
  6. ↑ a b c d e X. Scheldeman, L. Willemen, G. Coppens d'Eeckenbrugge, E. Romeijn-Peeters, MT Restrepo, J. Romero Motoche, D. Jimenez, M. Lobo, CI Medina, C. Reyes, D. Rodriguez, JA Ocampo, P. Van Damme, P. Goetgebeur: Distribution, diversity and environmental adaptation of highland papayas (Vasconcellea spp.) In tropical and subtropical America. In: Biodiversity and Conservation. 16 (6): (2007), 1867-1884. doi : 10.1007 / s10531-006-9086-x .
  7. ^ Vasconcellea pubescens A. DC. at Tropicos.org. Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis.
  8. ↑ a b c Tina Kyndt, Eliza Romeijn-Peeters, Bart Van Droogenbroeck, José P. Romero-Motochi, Godelieve Gheysen, Paul Goetghebeur: Species relationships in the genus Vasconcellea (Caricaceae) based on molecular and morphological evidence. In: American Journal of Botany. 92 (6): (2005), 1033-1044. doi : 10.3732 / ajb.92.6.1033 .
  9. ↑ Fernanda Antunes Carvalho, Susanne S. Renner: A dated phylogeny of the papaya family (Caricaceae) reveals the crop's closest relatives and the family's biogeographic history. In: Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. 65 (1): (2012), 46-53, doi : 10.1016 / j.ympev.2012.05.019 .