A Stinging Stunner of a Flower - Observation of the Week, 8/24/22

Our Observation of the Week is this Loasa tricolor plant, seen in Chile by @rocio-rmrz!

Currently an undergraduate biology student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Rocío Ramírez recently spent a few months in Chile for a research trip, learning forestry engineering field skills. As part of the program, they visited Canelo-Canelillo Park in Valparaiso, along the coast. 

I remember we were walking along the shoreline of the beach when someone yelled “look at the Loasa!” There were some stinging weeds that didn't seem very showy, but when I turned over the flower (which usually faces down) I saw strikingly beautiful petals with a characteristic morphology. At that moment it only occurred to me to take a photo with my cell phone because I didn't have something to position the flower for a good photo, however I knew we were going to return and I had to take a good photo there. 

We came back a few days later and a few meters from the Puyas (Puya chilensis) there was another small population of Loasa tricolor and now I was ready to take a good photo. I took out my camera and macro flash and, using a napkin, I put the flower in a better position and took several photos, trying to get a good shot of the details. Despite the napkin, I got irritated by the stinging hairs a couple of times but I think it was worth it. 

As Rocío mentioned, species in this genus have stinging hairs, similar to nettles. And in addition to being showy, the flowers are anatomically quite special.

Dr. Paulette Naulin, was the person who invited me to the field practice, mentioned that Loasa tricolor flowers are examples of hercogamy, which is the separation of male and female structures to prevent self-pollination. This is why they have such characteristic morphology.

“Since I was little, the activity I enjoyed doing the most was playing among the wild plants outside my house,” says Rocío (above, outside of Santiago), which led her to her current focus of botany.

I really didn't know what to do until a teacher mentioned in class “study what you liked to do the most when you were little because that's what you'll do for the rest of your lives,” and that's how I decided to study biology. When I was in my third semester, I studied botany and I was amazed at the vast diversity of plants, so I decided that this was what I wanted to do for life. I am currently developing my undergraduate thesis on parasitic plants of the Orobanchaceae family in Mexico, but what I like the most is finding new species of plants that I did not know in the field. Also, thanks to my boyfriend I was introduced to the world of photography, especially macro photography, which I personally like a lot because I think it highlights all the complex and curious structures of certain species.

She joined iNaturalist (“Naturalista” in Mexico) and mostly uses it to get ID help for critters and plants she comes across, and she’s learned ranges of native plants as well.

In Mexico, Naturalista has been used so that the task force members of the Natural Protected Areas can share the species they find on their usual routes, which seems to me to be a very useful tool to broaden the knowledge of biodiversity. Something similar is being applied in Chile, where they put on a small iNaturalist workshop in which the students of the group had to upload the species they encountered during field practice.

(Rocío’s text was written in Spanish. I’ve used Google Translate and lightly edited the text for clarity.)

- @diegoalmendras took a nice close-up of Loasa hairs in this observation.

- Check out other iNat observations of this stunning genus.

Posted on 24 de agosto de 2022, 05:26 PM by tiwane