Chile 2015

Habitat, nursery/collection and show tours.
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DaveW
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Re: Chile 2015

Post by DaveW »

On the way to Pan de Azucar we passed some buildings where the lower floors had been devastated by the force of the floods earlier in the year. The road had been cleared up, but no attempt at repairing the buildings yet.
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We found these two growing together.
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Cacti in this region do not rot but simply crumble to dust when they die. The plants look just as though somebody has set fire to them.
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As you can see from the dust around this shrub their nutrients are added back to the soil as fine dust rather than in the normal humus form in wetter climates.
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DaveW
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Re: Chile 2015

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We now found Neoporteria taltalensis, the original red flowered form, which as I said earlier Ritter originally included in his P. rupicolus until he found out Paul Hutchison had already described it.
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Also Thelocephala malleolata.
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We intended going to another site but found the floods earlier in the year had completely washed the road away, therefore we had to backtrack and go around another way to reach our destination.
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Roger tells me when he went this year the road has been repaired and is now a paved road. There has been a tremendous amount of new road building in the north of Chile since the floods in 2015. You can see how much land was washed into the sea from the hut at the top right of the picture which is still on the original land level.
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DaveW
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Re: Chile 2015

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On to Cifuncho, some difficult climbing up a steep hill with a loose sandy top surface and not all the rocks were securely embedded, therefore you had to be careful you did not slide down again and damage yourself or your camera.
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We found Eriosyce megacarpa.
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Again juvenile Eriosyce always seem to have stronger spines than the adults.
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A stop for lunch from the back of the cars at the bay.
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And later we found our first Thelocephala weisseri
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Pablo Weisser, a Chilean later working in S. Africa, first drew attention to this plant he had found earlier in a South African Succulent Journal (Aloe?). He remarked the plants normally grew underground under a layer of quartz sand which being transparent acted rather like the windows on Lithops and allowed enough light through for photosynthesis. The plants often only being discovered by just the flower protruding from the sand at flowering time, as in the image below. It was known for quite a few years before eventually being named after Pablo. As you can see from the two images there is some variation in flower colour.
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Re: Chile 2015

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On to Las Tortolas for one of the white bodied Copiapoa's.
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Unfortunately the only one I could find with buds had a damaged stem.
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This clump with Colin Cutler for scale was the only one we found. Whether it was a true clump or just a few plants growing together from one seed pod I do not know. As you can see from the plants at the top of the image above Colin's head most of the population is solitary, or with just the odd offset on them and not clumping from the base.
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DaveW
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Re: Chile 2015

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We found Thelocephala weisseri again at a different locality. This time the plants were above ground.
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Nottingham Branch BCSS. Joined the then NCSS in 1961, Membership number 11944. Cactus only collection.
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DaveW
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Re: Chile 2015

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The old roads were just dirt made by a bulldozer just ploughing a path through and usually just surface bound to suppress the dust with oil and seawater. However modern paved roads demand road stone and this is obtained by grinding up the rocks which often contain cacti. I believe they now have to replant them, but few survive this move since they need watering until their roots take hold again. However all modern countries, including the UK, obtain their road stone in a similar manner.
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The three Colin's hunting among the rocks.
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And this is what we found, beautiful plants of Copiapoa longistaminea.
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We just found an odd Neoporteria taltalensis later.
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Nottingham Branch BCSS. Joined the then NCSS in 1961, Membership number 11944. Cactus only collection.
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Re: Chile 2015

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On to La Madera, where we found probably the second commonest Thelocephala after T. napina in cultivation = T. esmeraldana. It has always been popular in collections ever since Ritter introduced it in the 1960's.
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Again we found there was some variation in flower colour (even stigma colour), often not recorded in original descriptions based on a single plant, therefore you have to be flexible applying descriptions to your plants and not take every feature as diagnostic, particularly flower colour.
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Last edited by DaveW on Thu Mar 09, 2017 11:02 am, edited 2 times in total.
Nottingham Branch BCSS. Joined the then NCSS in 1961, Membership number 11944. Cactus only collection.
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DaveW
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Re: Chile 2015

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Moving to Esmeralda and Copiapoa grandiflora.
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And of course another plant of the C. humilis group = Copiapoa esmeraldana.
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And the smallest Copiapoa of all, which does a good impression of "frogspawn" in habitat. The heads in the picture being 1.5cm-2cm diameter = Copiapoa laui.
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Nottingham Branch BCSS. Joined the then NCSS in 1961, Membership number 11944. Cactus only collection.
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DaveW
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Re: Chile 2015

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We now reached Botija as far north in Chile as we could go, yet have time to return to Santiago to get our flight back to the UK on 4th of November.
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The first plants we found were the Copiapoa named after Roger Ferryman = Copiapoa aremephiana, or at least David Hunt decided to name it after Rogers's collection number RMF 53 under which it was known for a time. R-M-F being rendered phonetically as AR-EM-EPH +iana, nothing like complicating nomenclature for cactophiles!
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We trekked up a quebrada that Colin Norton thought he recognised from a previous visit that was supposed to divide into two at the end where some plants grew. It did not, so obviously we had the wrong quebrada. However we did find a few plants along it.
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One or two Neoporteria floccosa's with varying amounts of hair.
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Roger thought these were the same, but they looked more like Neoporteria neohankeana to me?
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DaveW
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Re: Chile 2015

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Returning down the quebrada we moved on to another area where Copiapoa solaris grows. The Ferryman's in the background and Jean Cutler and Colin Parker in the foreground seeing if they could find anything else of interest.
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This area is getting a lot dryer as the Camanchaca (the mist climate) seems to be moving south. Though it had exceptional rains this year, infrequent rains cannot sustain the plants that rely on regular bathing with mists to supply them with water. Most of the plants on this hillside appeared to be dead, or in a bad way.

A quote from Graham Charles Copiapoa book page 63:-

"In Kakteen in Sudamerika Ritter makes the interesting statement that C. solaris grows at it's best above the mist zone and that it depends on occasional rain for survival. He goes on to say that on one occasion when visiting the plants, the ground was still wet from recent heavy rainfall. We generally accept that this region is becoming more arid, but even Ritter mentions the Eulychnia's associated with this species dying from drought, so perhaps what we see today is just part of a cycle of dry and less dry periods."

We did not climb to the top of the hill to see if there were better plants, but given the infrequent rains in this area I think, like us, Ritter must have visited in an exceptionally wet period. For instance Roger Ferryman has noticed on his repeated visits to Chile that Islaya krainziana Ritter found further north has been gradually dying out every year as the region got dryer and now there may be no living plants left in Chile (there are some over the border in Peru), though whether they may yet regenerate from seed if a wetter period returns is a matter for conjecture, maybe they always did, but our lifespans were to short to see it?
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These were plants on the lower part of the slope or on flatter ground.
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Many were in this state.
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These were the best we found.
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This was the best one.
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Nottingham Branch BCSS. Joined the then NCSS in 1961, Membership number 11944. Cactus only collection.
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