A good year for Arum

From: "Petra Schmidt" petra at plantdelights.com> on 2003.04.29 at 19:11:15(10143) It's been a good spring for arums in bloom here (elongatum, euxinum, orientale, balansanum, dioscorides, italicum) but it's been a gruesome sight in cutting off the spathe to witness the carnage of pollinators in the base of the spathe...what wild parties they must have down there! I've learned to literally shake out the inflorescence while out of doors before taking the inflorescence back inside to my desk...still, some hang on and come crawling out like drunken sailors when the spathe is removed, but most feature molding corpses in 10 insect-bodies-deep layers. On the other hand, the shapes and colors of the pistillodes/staminodes are rather nice, like underwater sea creatures...the mysteries of what lies inside the arum spathe tube... Petra +More Petra Schmidt Research Manager Juniper Level Botanic Gardens @ Plant Delights Nursery 9241 Sauls Road Raleigh, NC 27603-9326 USA petra@plantdelights.com www.plantdelights.com

From: Marc Gibernau gibernau at cict.fr> on 2003.04.30 at 07:54:35(10146) Dear Petra, I found your comments on Arum very interesting, because in the natural range of this genus, such carnage of pollinators are not documented. Whatever is the fly pollinator: Psychodidae, Sphaeroceridae, Ceratopogonidae, Chironomidae and even if hundreds of them can be captured. So I wonder what kind of insects have "your" Arum captured? May be this disfunction is due to a non-adaptation of the local insect fauna to this "exotic" species. Sincerely yours, Marc +More ***************************************************** Marc Gibernau Laboratoire d'Evolution & Diversit? Biologique (FRE 2629) Universite Paul Sabatier 118 Route de Narbonne - Bat 4R3-B2 31062 Toulouse Cedex 4 France Tel: (33)-05-61-55-67-43 Fax: (33)-05-61-55-73-27 site web : http://www.edb.ups-tlse.fr/equipe3/equipe3.htm http://www.aroid.org/pollination/gibernau/index.html *****************************************************

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