Velloziaceae: Pandas of the Plant World

By Ruy José Válka Alves

Velloziaceae – Pandas of the plant world summarizes my research on this fascinating plant family, exemplifying my decades of love, field and lab work, which was lurking in my field notebooks, photos and computers, slowly being chiseled into scientific articles. I fell in love with these beautiful plants on expeditions to several Brazilian mountains. I discovered that many of these plants live for thousands of years – several extant individuals were already flowering long before the discovery of South America, some even before Christ. This is documented and illustrated by over 100 photos and figures as well as by my field experiments in which I marked individuals and monitored their growth rates for several decades. You will find chapters dealing with their Geographic Distribution, Taxonomy, Vegetative and Reproductive Morphology, Clonality, Ecological Adaptations, Longevity, Pollination, Seeds, Herbivory, Function as Epiphyte Hosts (Phorophytes), Natural habitats and challenges to cultivation, Anatomy, Chemistry, Uses, Conservation, Intrinsic relation with Fire, Vegetation, and a large set of references.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781447513896

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Foreword

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Apologia pro libro meo

This is not a monograph about Velloziaceae. This book merely summarizes my limited experience with these fascinating plants.

Velloziaceae are a love-at-first-sight plant family. Matter nourishes the body; Beauty nourishes the soul. The beauty of their flowers rivals that of the orchids, yet they are much rarer, difficult to cultivate, and usually grow on rocks in rugged mountainous terrain. They adorn rocky outcrops and give them distinguishable character. They dominate landscapes in a way which fascinated renowned naturalists exploring 19th Century Brazil. Later, some Velloziaceae were also found in other parts of South and Central America, Africa, Madagascar, and the Arab peninsula through Yemen. They are among the most vulnerable of plants. They are as unique, strange, and endangered as the giant pandas.

Their living stem apex, which connects leaves to roots, is but a few millimeters long, and has a very short life span. They grow slowly, from a few millimeters to about one centimeter per year. The tallest individuals can be over 7m tall and well over 1000 years old. Despite their slow growth, some are harvested and offered for sale as fire starters at local fairs due to their high resin content. There are records of their caudices having been used as construction material and as fuel for train locomotives. Due to this, many taller species probably became extinct in the past five centuries of human exploitation, long before they could have been described by scientists.

Chemical studies have revealed that some metabolic compounds produced by Velloziaceae are effective against cancer, snake venom, bacteria and other ailments. However, if these plants were to be harvested for industry, their scarcity and slow growth would soon lead to their extinction. In this rapidly changing world, their destiny is more uncertain than their phylogeny. Another ten books would be needed to do justice to these enigmatic plants; hence I hope humanity produces enough scholars, enthusiastic enough for continuing this endeavor.

Currently in the Order Pandanales, the Velloziaceae are a beautiful and unusual tropical monocot family. Beautiful mainly due to their large, exuberant, lily-like flowers, and unusual due to their occurrence in stressful habitats and caulirosulate growth forms. Known species are confined to the tropics, with the single exception of Barbacenia paranaensis 24o 8´S, extending merely 77km south of the Tropic of Capricorn (S 23°26′10.6″).

There are about 100 times more orchid species in the world than those of Velloziaceae, yet we are still unable to grow almost any of the latter ex-situ (outside their natural habitats).

Most previous authors have considerably underestimated the total number of known species of Velloziaceae. Not considering cryptic species and those lumped together by some specialists, Velloziaceae consists of at least 304 species. They consist of 231 good species in three Neotropical genera from South and Central America (respectively at least 102 species of Barbacenia; 125 of Vellozia and 3 of Nanuza [as commented herein], (Flora e Funga do Brasil, 2023); 4 spp. of the Austral Andean Barbaceniopsis plus V. andina (Ibisch et al., 2001); and in the Paleotropics by at least 70 species of Xerophyta, all but one growing exclusively in either Africa or Madagascar (Behnke et al., 2013).

By Vellozias, in this book, I mean any species of the family Velloziaceae. The World Flora Online recognizes six: Barbacenia Vand., Barbaceniopsis L.B. Sm., Nanuza L.B. Sm. & Ayensu, Vellozia Vand. and Xerophyta Juss. I recognize some of the additional described genera as distinct, and herein exclude Acanthochlamys P.C. Kao (WFO, 2022) from the Velloziaceae. According to Williams et al. (1994), at least chemically, and by seed coat types (Sousa-Baena & Menezes, 2014), recognition of the genera Aylthonia and Pleurostima, treated by mainstream taxonomists under Barbacenia, makes sense, as do distinct chemistries of Vellozia, and of Xerophyta from Africa vs. Madagascar. Species names herein usually follow mainstream taxonomic databases, unless otherwise specified. Names of species mostly follow the Brazilian Flora Database.

Agreeing with Chinese authors, the Palearctic Acanthochlamys from China, is herein considered a member of the separate family Acanthochlamydaceae. It possibly has more than one species [available field photos with flowers varying in shape and color on the web suggest this]. Acanthochlamys shall appear several times in the text for comparative reasons, because mainstream molecular biologists insistently place it in Velloziaceae.

Taxonomists have been discussing circumscriptions of the ranks for centuries; yet no true consensus has ever been achieved for Velloziaceae. If there is continuous debate about the circumscription of species, there is growing doubt about the circumscription of genera, and even more growing doubt about the circumscription of higher ranks, all the way beyond Order. Especially, the generic circumscriptions of Velloziaceae (even excluding Acanthochlamys) are not globally unanimous.

What you will find in this book is a fraction of my decades of field and lab work, which was lurking in my field notebooks, photos and computers, slowly being chiseled into scientific articles. My e-mail is included at the end for those of you who may have fundamental suggestions, corrections or questions. However, should you find a few commas out of place, for instance in the references, I thank you here and now, but please do not send that kind of feedback. I am never going to meticulously format citations and references at this point. You shall find various formats which were intended for different journals. If you copy the references and browse the Internet, most of those sources will show up to be downloaded, often for an unfair lot of money.

I learned so much from my mistakes that I seriously consider committing more. In late 2021, taking an unpaid three-year leave of absence from my Professorship, I realized how boring and time-consuming it would be to go through several rounds of review for each article in the so-called prestigious journals, which became more about show business than science, making profit from scientist´s salaries and grants and charging unreasonable fees for access to information generated by hardworking humans and public money. In academia, we spend more time reporting scientometrics than doing actual science. In scientific articles, reviewers and editors often enforce changes upon the essence of what we have to say. What a crime, what a waste of energy and time!

I thank my former students, from whom I keep learning, and most of whom became my friends. I wish I had thanked Lyman Bradford Smith and Johann Jacob Becker more emphatically for their support in my early studies. Of those who helped me with my naturalists´ journey I am grateful, among others, to: Alessandra Ribeiro Guimarães, André Dias dos Santos, Anina Coetzee, Arnold Ezra Nogueira Bryan, Carlos Alberto Raposo Moreira, Cláudia Moraes de Rezende, David Rivard, Elisabet Spens, Elsie Franklin Guimarães, Emílie Balátová-Tuláčková, Fatima Regina Gonçalves Salimena, Gabriel Lacerda Troianelli, Heloísa Alves de Lima, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Jiří Kolbek, Jiří Moravec, Jorge Fontella Pereira, José Primeiro Teixeira Neto, Josef Válka, Kátia Torres Ribeiro, Kelly Antunes, Marcos Eduardo Guerra Sobral, Marcos Valério Peron, Miriam Cristina Alvarez Pereira, Laurent Lange, Luíz Flamarion Oliveira, Nílber Gonçalves da Silva, Pedro Sérgio Fernandes, Pedro Slawinski, Rachel Sadala-Castilho, Rejan Guedes Bruni, Renato Mello-Silva, Rudolf Prokop, Ruy Antonio Reis Alves, Václav Laňka, Věroslav Samek, Vlastimil Lapáček, Walter Valentim, William MacCullough and the many members of the Valle/Reis/Alves family from Rio de Janeiro and the Alves/Lira family from Rio Sono in Tocantins.

I no longer thank institutions, as I was obliged to before during my scientific career, because they have no solid principles, nor personalities.

The e-book format is less constraining, and I can share more images, even emotions, while conveying potentially useful information. The order in which chapters appear in this book was very hard to balance. Morphology and anatomy do not appear in the usual sequence, because other chapters are about correlate subjects. For instance, Longevity and Growth Rate monitoring are intrinsically related to Vegetative [caudex] Morphology; Pollination and Seeds to Inflorescence and floral morphology; etc. Aspects of biology are discussed as various points in the text.

Scientists across the globe, especially from developing countries, could not work without the brave initiative of Alexandra Elbakyan, founder of Sci-Hub. She saved a lot of time which scholars would otherwise dedicate to physical searches for papers in remote, inaccessible, and bureaucratized libraries. Top notch scientists working in developing countries, often with next-to-no institutional support, could hardly be productive without Elbakyan. More importantly, she saved trees and forests on the Planet, sources of paper for the hardcopies and their photocopies. We owe you, Alexandra!

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Fig. 1. - Barbacenia purpurea Hook. Illustration in Hooker (1827), Bot. Mag. 54: pl. 2777, Lectotypified by Alves et al. (2021). Curiously this is the species I first photographed, as a student, on the cliffs of the sugarloaf in Rio in the late 1980s.

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Fig. 2. - Barbacenia rogieri Moore & Ayres. Gard. Mag. Bot. (Römer & Usteri) 2: 209 (1850). http://plantillustrations.org.

I have not found another book dedicated to Velloziaceae of the World, hence I am honored to offer you this putative premiere. Potentially useful information can be disseminated without strict obedience to editorial format. Instead of spending time abiding by all paper journal guidelines and going through editorial turmoil, I prefer to be doing more science, writing another e-book and saving some trees. There probably will not be a second edition of this one. In four decades, I spent more than a million bucks on travel, venue and field equipment. Though I initially intended to offer this e-book free of charge, my friends convinced me that I deserve to replace my jungle boots and camera once in a while.

Distribution

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Fig. 3. - Approximate distribution of the families Velloziaceae (red) and Acanthochlamydaceae (blue) modified some years ago from APG by RJVA.

South and Central America

Most American Velloziaceae are locally endemic to small outcrop formations in South America, with a few such as V. squamata Pohl and V. tubiflora (A.Rich.) Kunth more widespread, the latter reaching the Northern Hemisphere at 8o 26´in Panama. In the Andes, there are five known species of Velloziaceae, all endemic: Vellozia andina Ibisch, Vásquez & Nowicki and four species of the endemic genus Barbaceniopsis L.B.Sm., which marks the southernmost limit of the family in South America at 26o 25´S latitude, with B. castillonii (Hauman) Ibisch growing at 2140–2600m asl. in Argentina. In Paraná, Brazil, Barbacenia paranaensis L. B. Sm. does not exceed 24o 8´S, not far south of the Tropic of Capricorn. The highest known altitudinal record in the family belongs to the Andean Barbaceniopsis boliviensis (Baker) L.B. Smith, at 2900m asl., but growing at a lower latitude than B. castilonii. Vellozia caruncularis, V. sellowii, V. tubiflora and V. vaiabilis also occur around the border between Bolivia and Brazil (Ibisch et al., 2001). Acanthochlamys bracteata (here treated in the separate family Acanthochamydaceae) occurs from 2700 to 3500 m asl., between 99°89’N and 101°30’N (Chen, 1981).

Cattle-ranching by Eurpoean settlers was already present long before the first naturalists arrived, hence the natural aspect of the landscapes prior to European settlement remains unknown. The Vellozia stands we see today are the result of five centuries of degradation. The flora and fauna of campos rupestres were probably even more exuberant before 1500.

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Fig. 4. - Above: Vallis velloziis arborescentibus consita: In Morro do Gravier prov. Minarum. Probably the first published illustrated landscape dominated by Vellozia [probably V. compacta and V. dracaenoides, at right] was depicted by Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802–1858) between 1821 and 1825. It was published by the German botanist Ignatz Urban (1906, in: Mart. Fl. Bras. Vol. I, Part. I, Tab. 4). The depicted scenery is still to be seen in rare parts of Minas Gerais, for instance in some parts of the Ouro Branco range, of which Morro do Gravier is an extension. Martius is often wrongly cited as the illustrator in recent works.

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Fig. 5. - Brazil, Minas Gerais, Serra de Itambé (Spix & Martius 1831:12). Mountains of quartzite with several shrubby Vellozia to which Spix & Martius (1823) referred as stemmed lilly herbs (stämmige Lilienerherben). Pico Itambé dominant