Lion paw
| Lion paw | ||||||||||||
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Lion paw ( Bomarea ovallei ) |
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| Bomarea ovallei | ||||||||||||
| ( Phil. ) Ravenna |
The lion's paw ( Bomarea ovallei ) is a species of the genus Bomarea within the family of alstroemeriaceae (Alstroemeriaceae).
description
The lion's paw is an evergreen, perennial, herbaceous plant . It forms runners and from a tuber a long, bare, unbranched and creeping stem axis that only points upwards at its extreme end. The leaves are turned 180 ° and bare on both sides. The simple leaf blade is egg-shaped to lanceolate-egg-shaped with a length of 2 to 11 centimeters and a width of 1.5 to 5 centimeters and narrows to the base of the blade. The foliage leaves have stomata facing the leaf axis and the leaf veins are only faintly visible. The leaves on the lower part of the stem axis are reduced to scale leaves.
The inflorescence is an upright thyrse , the hypopodium of the primary flowers is between 1 and 3 millimeters long, the epipodium between 0 and 1 centimeter. The opposing leaves of the primary and secondary flowers are 0.3 to 1 or 0.3 to 0.7 centimeters long and 0.2 to 0.6 or 0.1 to 0.4 centimeters wide.
The upright, hermaphrodite flowers are radial symmetry , 2 to 2.5 inches long and threefold. The bracts are free. The inner and outer bracts are largely similar, the outer, scarlet on both sides, are differentiated into blade and nail, the inner, black and yellow at the base, however, only indistinctly. The bracts remain on the ripe fruit. The approach of the inner bracts is channel-shaped and has functional nectaries .
There are two circles with three stamens each. The subordinate, bald ovary is single-fan. The stylus is either curved or straight and three-bifurcated. The capsule fruit is twisted. The round seeds, 2 to 3 millimeters in diameter, are surrounded by a fleshy, red sarcotesta and the endosperm is hard.
Like all Bomarea species, the lion's paw has a base chromosome number of x = 9.
distribution
The distribution area of the lion's paw is limited to the Carrizal Bajo Valley, a valley of the Atacama desert that is open to the sea north of the port city of Huasco in northern Chile, where it grows on rocks at altitudes between 10 and 100 meters.
The closest occurrences of species of the genus are 300 ( Bomarea dulcis , Bomarea involucrosa ) or 400 kilometers away ( Bomarea salsilla ). It is unclear how the speciation took place. On the one hand, the species could have emerged from a predecessor population due to the isolation of the valley as a result of the drying up of the formerly wetter Atacama. Another possibility is that a predecessor species has been introduced over a greater distance and, due to the small population, the recent lion paw has developed as a separate species due to the increased accumulation of mutations.
Systematics
The lion's paw was long understood as the only species of the genus Leontochir , but then in 2000 Pierfelice Ravenna incorporated it into the genus Bomarea . Later research confirmed this.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Anton Hofreiter : Leontochir: A Synonym Of Bomarea (Alstroemeriaceae)? In: Harvard Papers in Botany , Volume 11, No. 1, 2006, pp. 53-60, ISSN 1043-4534 .
- ↑ Lone Aagesen, A. Mariel Sanso: The Phylogeny of the Alstroemeriaceae, Based on Morphology, rps16 Intron, and rbcL Sequence Data. In: Systematic Botany , Volume 28, Issue 1) 2003, pp. 47-69, ISSN 0363-6445 .
Web links
- Leontochir ovallei
- Löwentatze - Website of the Munich Botanical Garden