Powdery-strap air plant, lantern of the forest (Bromeliad family)
Origin: Southern Florida to Brazil
Our featured plant is an epiphytic bromeliad that is purported to be carnivorous. Catopsis berteroniana grows high up in the trees, often times in bare trees in full sun, with little opportunity to catch the falling leaves or other detritus that many bromeliads use for nutrition. When bromeliad tanks are actually dissected and studied, we have found over and over that Catopsis contains many times more non-aquatic insects than the average bromeliad. This fact, combined with the chalky powder which coats the underside of the leaves and the plant’s habit of living so high and exposed in the canopy, have led to the popular theory that this is an actively insectivorous plant.
Lots of carnivorous plants contain a chalky powder. It causes loss of traction, making the insects slip and fall back in the tanks, and it also reflects ultraviolet light, in effect rendering the plant invisible to insects. The theory is that the insect thinks it sees a straight shot up to the sky with nothing in the way, and then collides with the leaf, falling back into the tank. Catopsis berteroniana has adapted to the high light of the open canopy, and because of this it usually appears more yellow than green. The chalk amplifies this effect. They can be quite striking when the sun is hitting them right, causing them to “glow” (hence their Spanish common name, lampara de la selva, or “lantern of the forest”) in the trees.
And, for Floridians, yet another beautiful reason to go exploring in our own backyards. This is a plant that you can find in the Everglades, and you don’t even have to leave the air-conditioned comfort of your family car. There, you can find Catopsis growing in scraggly, bare trees, buttonwoods and mangroves, right on the side of the highway in the National Park. Or you can come out to Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, where we have one on display in our Tropical Conservatory. Check it out!
Text by David Troxell
Dr. Toscano de Brito departured for Brazil last in early June and will be away for nearly two months. He will be doing field and herbarium work related to his project “The Pleurothallid Orchids of Brazil”, which is partially funded by the National Geographic Society and the IMLS. The project goal is to prepare a monograph of roughly 600 Brazilian Pleurothallid orchid species and involves molecular and taxonomic research. During his second field trip to Brazil (the first one was undertaken last year) he will be searching for species not yet sampled for his molecular and morphological studies in order “to fill gaps.” This not only requires field work, but also work in the herbarium as many species have been collected once and are only known by a single herbarium specimen. He will be also visiting several orchid growers and collaborating with serious amateurs in Brazil, many of them holders of important and rich orchid collections. He has just come back from the Amazon region, where he spent a week working in the herbarium of Museu Goeldi, in Belém, the capital of the state of Pará, and searching for endemic and rare Amazon orchids which grow as epiphytes on trees of flooded Amazonian forests (also known as Igapó forests). 
Our second trip to Roraima-tepui during March 2012 in southern Venezuela was a success. We faced similar logistical challenges as last year, but in the end we were able to fly to the tepui summit by helicopter and spend 14 days collecting and photographing plants, and conducting vegetation and soil studies. Our team of four (myself, Shingo Nozawa, Yuribia Vivas, Elisabet Safont) worked together the first week in the southern part of the mountain, which was a new area for us. We found lots of new things and documented an alarming number of new exotic-invasive species for the summit, likely carried up on boots or in gear by unknowing visitors. The second week, Elisabet Safont from Spain, and I, set up another camp in the northern part of the mountain, a day’s-hike away. There we managed to enter three areas we were not able to the year before, in part because of the dense fog and lack of time. The weather was friendlier to us this year and we only had two days of serious rain. 
Selby Botanical Gardens, the Institute for Regional Conservation and Everglades National Park have partnered to identify, collect, propagate, and augment populations of the rarest plant species of Everglades National park. The first major outplanting of one orchid and one fern was conducted in July of 2011. A follow-up inspection in February 2012 demonstrated that half of the orchids and 1/5 of the ferns had survived. Additional outplantings will occur in July 2012.
Selby Botanical Gardens has joined the Global Plants Initiative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with aims to digitize and make available for students and researchers over 2 million records of plant type specimens from around the world. The GPI network currently includes more than 166 partner herbaria representing almost 60 countries. The output of GPI is presented through JSTOR Plant Science, an online environment that brings together content, tools, and people interested in plant science. The GPI not only repatriates data back to countries from which the specimens originated; within a fraction of time and cost it would take to visit herbaria or loan specimens, type specimen data are made available to a wider audience.
Selby Botanical Gardens has just completed 16 miles of botanical transects through the Walton Ranch Preserve in south Sarasota County. The Walton Ranch Preserve was purchased through the County’s Environmentally Sensitive Lands Program, and contains a mixture of high-quality wetands and hammocks, mixed in with pasture. Selby Gardens botanists documented the presence of 333 species of vascular plants, including four species never before collected in Sarasota County. The work was conducted from July 2011 through January, 2012. Selby Gardens has previously conducted botanical surveys on the following Sarasota County properties: Deer Prairie Creek Preserve, Walton Ranch Preserve, Curry Creek Preserve, Red Bug Slough, Circus Hammock Preserve, Sleeping Turtles Preserve, and the Old Myakka Preserve.
In preparation for a series of publications on the pleurothallid genera of Brazil, twenty-four new species have been discovered by Selby Gardens botanist Antonio Toscano de Brito and collaborator Carlyle Luer of the Missouri Botanical Garden. The new speciest are described and illustrated in 
In the latest issue of the