Ad Fontes? Semper ad Montes!: Ruy José Válka Alves - Previously Unpublished Research

This book is composed of articles I devised and organized, with original research, mainly in botany, conducted along decades in Brazil. Some of the manuscripts which became chapters herein had been formatted as articles according to the targeted journals. I have not attempted to unify their formats in this book. I did not perfect nor further edit non-essential details inherent to the journals. The proof of the pudding is in the eating [as opposed to the wrapping]. Modifications of format were done only to adapt the content to electronic publication form (e-pub). The chapters (separate projects or article manuscripts) are in no specific order. Collaborators, regardless of the volume of their contributions, appear as co-authors of the individual chapters, or are otherwise acknowledged in the text.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781446779729

Book preview

Foreword

Mountains are critical sources of ecosystem services (e.g.: Ngwenya et al., 2018). When compared to lowlands, they consist of multiple combinations of niches combining altitudinal gradients with diverse conditions of insolation, wind, humidity etc. As islands, mountains are also isolated from the surrounding matrix environments. Hence, I have always regarded them as the most potent sources of speciation, and most explicit laboratories for its study. This is why I chose my motto title which translates as: To the sources? Always to the mountains!

Unless you are a Vulcan, science is about the wow factor (as opposed to the Impact factor and other scientometric nonsense). Not so long ago, curiosity instead of publication per se, used to be the main drive for doing research. In the long run, effective scientific publication is not as objective as expected by laymen. It always ends up based on the opinions of a few editors and reviewers. Science ought to be openly discussed, not personally disgusting! It is in my nature to criticize the show business which science recently has become, as I did in the Futures section of Nature (Alves, 2009).

To ascertain that scientometrics are all wrong and add no value to our Planet, I refer you, dear reader, to two choice articles: 1) A spoof paper in Science which revealed little or very little scrutiny in many open-access journals (Bohannon, 2013) and 2) Why [peer review], the greatest scientific experiment in history, failed (Mastroianni, 2022).

Scientists worldwide can organize and publish their findings which were latent or refused by editors and/or reviewers, often due to opinion, institutional and/or personal competition issues [some lumped under conflicting interests]. But you can still publish your work in e-books, making your data available to anyone without censorship bottlenecks. In this manner we can present information potentially valuable to the Planet which was trapped in our lack of time, or in the rhetoric editorial systems of conventional journals. Time (not the journal which patented that name) and the public at large can then decide which contributions are worthy or valuable. I congratulate Adam Mastroianni for a brilliant paper on how peer review has actually been hindering science (Mastroianni 2022). To the neglected authors, decent editors and overexploited reviewers, my sincere thanks for their equally precious time! Live long and prosper!

I try to provide as much metadata as possible explaining what motivated the research; Authors; Journals to which they were submitted; Rounds of review; Eventual comments; Figures, both edited and not. Some articles had been submitted to scientific journals but ended up refused, and we lost motivation to pursue them further at the time. One was initially accepted, and subsequently refused without explanation by the chief editor.

Another upside of the e-book format herein is that it can be freely illustrated with color photos, graphs, etc. Many scientific journals still maintain costly page charges for color print, insisting on the outdated belief that colors must be expensive to publish. They obviously also have restrictions as to the number of illustrations.

Some of the manuscripts which became chapters herein had been formatted as articles according to the targeted journals. I have not attempted to unify their formats in this book. I did not perfect nor further edit non-essential details inherent to the journals. The proof of the pudding is in the eating [as opposed to the wrapping]. Modifications of format were done only to adapt the content to electronic publication form (e-pub). The chapters (separate projects or article manuscripts) are in no specific order. I am including them as they appear to me from grey data on my hard disks and in my field notebooks. Collaborators, regardless of the volume of their contribution, appear as co-authors of the individual chapters, or are otherwise acknowledged in the text.

References

Alves, R. J. V.2009. (18/11/2009). A letter from the past - On the dubious position of Aelfus in the evolutionary tree of mankind. Nature 462:380. https://www.nature.com/articles/462380a

Bohannon, J. 2013. Who's Afraid of Peer Review?. Science. 342 (6154): 60–65. Bibcode:2013Sci...342...60B. doi:10.1126/science.342.6154.60. PMID 24092725. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.342.6154.60

Mastroianni, A. 2022 (Dec 13). The rise and fall of peer review. Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing. https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review

Ngwenya SJ, Torquebiau E & Ferguson JWH. 2018. Mountains as a critical source of ecosystem services: the case of the Drakensberg, South Africa. Environ. Dev. Sustain. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-017-0071-1. (unpaginated).

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Has the Pride of Burma gone with the wind?

Ruy José Válka Alves¹,², Luciene Campos São Leão¹,², Heloísa Alves de Lima¹,² Bárbara de Sá Haiad¹,² & Marcos A. Raposo¹,³

¹) Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Museu Nacional, ²) Departamento de Botânica; ³) Departamento de Vertebrados

Submitted in November 2020 to Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências: Manuscript ID: AABC-2021-0003.R1. Refused by the chief editor in May 2021 after 2 promising rounds of review in which we complied with all suggestions of the reviewers.

Abstract - Amherstia nobilis is popularly known as the pride of Burma and the queen of ornamental trees. Bearing large, showy flowers with predominantly red-orange petals, it is a textbook example of ornithophily (bird-pollination), so we were puzzled when a recent research study suggested it to be anemophilous (wind-pollinated). The species is widely cultivated in the tropics and propagated vegetatively because it rarely produces viable seeds. In this paper we review the information on its distribution, reproductive biology, document hummingbirds as ex-situ floral visitors, some bees as nectar thieves, experimentally demonstrate pollen viability and ex-situ production of seeds. We present compelling evidence for bird, as opposed to wind pollination of Amherstia on the basis of effective pollination by hummingbirds and indices of bird pollination syndrome comprising nectar production, relative positions of floral parts, predominantly red perianth color display and striate pollen.

Introduction - The Pride of Burma, a monotypic tree genus consisting of Amherstia nobilis Wall. (Fabaceae, Detarieae), was described based on Wallich 596 (K!), from a specimen cultivated in 1827 in a monastery garden at Kawgon (Kogun), on the Salween River in the Burmese [currently Myanmar] province of Martaban (Wallich, 1830). There are two observations on the possible native range of this mysterious species: In 1857, The Illustrated London News of April 4th (p. 306, retrieved August 1, 2018) says "The tree was first brought into notice by Lady Sarah Amherst, a great promoter of botanical science in India. Lord Amherst spent five years in that country, and made an excursion to the Himalaya mountains, at the foot of which they discovered these rare trees." A possibly wild specimen was allegedly seen 38 years later in Burma, on a bank of the Yunzalin river, a tributary of the lower Salween, (Parish, 1865; Lyte, 2003). Almost two centuries after the type was indicated, no wild collections were still known to Gurney (2007). To date we were also unable to locate wild-collected specimens in herbaria, so all observations of pollinators and/or visitors of Amherstia flowers have been conducted in cultivation.

Amherstia is considered extinct in the wild, corroborating Llamas (2003). In herbaria, specimens are also extremely rare. Amherstia is cultivated throughout the tropics (Tucker, 2000), including Brazil (Lorenzi et al. 2003), rarely producing viable seeds (Garcia, 1975; RJVA, this article).

Fascinated by the floral display of Amherstia, Paul Knuth travelled to Java and, in March of 1899, he studied its pollination system at the Buitenzorg Botanic Gardens in Bogor. He found that sunbirds (Nectariniidae) were able to enter either the top or bottom of the flower; the pollen becoming attached to either the breast or head, causing either self- or cross-pollination (Knuth et al. 1904/1905: 347–357); he further commented the occasional possibility of pollen transfer by Pierid butterflies and Xylocopa bees, and his impressive field work inspired further investigations, such as Werth (1915) and van der Pijl (1937).

Though sunbirds are commonly known to perch on or near flowers, in the Old World, some species such as crimson sunbirds also collect nectar by hovering in front of flowers, similarly to hummingbirds. See the excellent online photos of the crimson sunbird, Aethopyga siparaja (Raffles, 1822), hovering while collecting nectar from flowers of Thalia dealbata Fraser ex Roscoe (Marantaceae), a North American species cultivated in Singapore, and Lantana camara L. (Verbenaceae), a Central and South American species, cultivated in India, see Brysch (2017) and Saikia (2019) (Fig. 1, A–B).

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FIGURE 1. A, B - The crimson sunbird Aethopyga siparaja hovering in front of flowers, respectively Thalia dealbata Fraser ex Roscoe (Marantaceae), a North American species cultivated in Singapore, and Lantana camara L. (Verbenaceae), a Central and South American species photographed in India. Modified respectively from Brysch (2017) and Saikia (2019). C, D - The Swallow-tailed Hummingbird Eupetomena macroura (Gmelin, 1788) foraging nectar from Amherstia (arrows) at C: Museu Nacional, and D: Florália Gardens, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Photos: RJVA.

Garcia (1975) studied five Amherstia trees cultivated in Laguna, Philippines. Her experiments with cross and self-pollination by hand were not successful, but she observed that some pistils had been naturally pollinated, without indicating the pollinating agents. Only six apparently viable seeds with a diameter of about an inch were produced during her exhaustive laboratory investigations, all generated by natural pollination, only one of which germinated, while the other five decayed. [This probably happened due to lack of scarification]. Another finding by Garcia (1975) was that pollen tubes in anatomically analyzed pistils developed too slowly considering pistil length, and some tubes even curved backwards; pollen tubes did not develop at all in extracted stigmatic fluid.

Endress (1994) concluded that the floral features of Amherstia suggested lepidopteran pollination, citing Werth (1915) and van der Pijl (1938) for reports of bird visits. Tucker (2000) also advocated that the floral structure of Amherstia suggests pollination by butterflies, considering that birds and Xylocopa bees were also plausible. Wickens (2001:51) considered sunbirds as pollinators of Amherstia and other Caesalpinioideae. Subramanya & Radhamany (1993), considered Amherstia entirely or partly ornithophilous commenting that birds feeding on their nectar had not yet been observed (but see Endress, 1994 and Hails & Kavanagh, 2013:256 and this article). Amherstia was also considered bird-pollinated by Banks & Rudall (2016:426) citing previous studies and concluding that there is a potential correlation between striate/verrucate [pollen] patterns and vertebrate pollination.

In Brazil, in 1998 RJVA, using testa scarification prior to sowing, produced two seedlings of Amherstia, from seeds which had been collected at the Florália orchard in Niterói. One seedling with about 25 cm was transplanted to a location in Minas Gerais, Brazil, where it succumbed later to an attack of leaf-cutting Atta ants. At the Floália orchard, many Amherstia plants have been produced from viable seeds to date (Sandra Altenburg Odebrecht, pers. comm.). There is on-line evidence that one viable seed was also produced by a tree in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, stating that "it was pollinated by something flying around Broward, not by hand (Fastfeat", 2013).

Hence, for over a century of scruitiny, Amherstia has been considered animal-pollinated. But, was zoophily an old dogma sensu Rocca & Sazima (2010)? Were Renjumol & Radhamany (2017) departing from old dogmas when they concluded, in their recent paper, that the species was anemophilous? They studied three individuals cultivated in Kerala, India (08˚33.539N; 076˚53.113E, 47 m asl.), where this species was flowering from November to April with maximum flowering during February and March (the end of the arid season). This flowering peak is in consonance with the original description from that region: "…floribus onustam mense Martii" (Wallich, 1830).

The showy, predominantly red-orange, zygomorphic flowers and the tiny stigmatic surface of Amherstia are not compatible with the anemophily syndrome sensu Fægri & van der Pijl (1979). The striate pollen of Amherstia is a further indication of ornithophily (Banks & Rudall, 2016 and references therein). The anemophily proposed by Renjumol & Radhamany (2017) struck us as improbable and lead us to observe several aspects of reproductive biology of the ex-situ plants available to us in Brazil, and to present our findings herein.

Materials and Methods - In Rio de Janeiro state there are several