Recently an unidentified species of Jacquemontia was located in Taiwan by Dr Yang Sheng Zehn, who asked my help to identify it. We co-authored the account of Convolvulaceae in the Flora of Taiwan, edit. 2, and we have never seen this species before. I believe this is an adventive, newly discovered and documented from Taiwan and seek your help to identify it. Some photos of the living plants in habitat are below; the high-resolution image files are attached to this blog post. The locality data for the population are as follows:
Taiwan, Pingtung County, Kenting National Park, Pauli village, Houwan. On exposed, uplifted coral reef ca 50 m elev. Fully exposed in bright sunlight.
Plants sprawling on the thin soil of the exposed reef, or weakly twining in Euphorbia cyathophora. All parts of the plant are densely stellate hairy; the hairs are consistently 3-armed, the arms nearly equal to subequal in length.
My guess is that this must be either a tropical American species or an Australian one, since the plants don't resemble anything I know from the field or herbarium that are found in Asia, Malesia, or Africa. Previously I emailed several colleagues knowledgeable about Jacquemontia spp. from the Americas and Australia and based on the responses received I focussed my search on the Meso-American J. pinetorum. Now that specimens are in hand, I have used Kenneth Robertson's PhD dissertation on Jacquemontia to attempt to key out the material. It could be J. pinetorum but could equally well be J. polyantha. Unfortunately, the SING herbarium has no material of either species for comparison, so I am unable to proceed further to verify that the Taiwan plants are an American species.
It is also entirely possible that this is a species from Australia; there is no literature to help idenitfy those, nor does SING have bona fide vouchers, so I can't test this hypothesis either.
At this point I would like to open up the discussion to the community of researchers who work on Jacquemontia to seek expert help. I have a few vouchers here and if you would like to see one of them please indicate this in a blog post or via email. I will send one to your herbarium, while supplies last!
Dr Yang's email is yangsz@mail.npust.edu.tw
Many thanks and please do post your ideas as comments to this blog so we can all see and respond. Many thanks for your help, George Staples
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