Friday Fabulous Flower - Lipstick plant

Well, how ridiculous is that?  TPP is in the tropics and he allows a Friday to sneak by without posting a flower picture! So here you go.  This plant has several nicknames, but the most common one is lipstick plant (Psychotria elata) in the Rubiaceae (coffee family).  Up in the northern temperate zone this is not an important or common family, but down here in the neotropics rubiads are everywhere.  There are over 45 genera here at the field station and more than a couple of dozen species in the genus Psychotria.  Most of them have fairly small white or yellowish tubular flowers, and not very conspicuous, so like many such plants, the flowers are surrounded by pairs of very conspicuous red bracts.  The bracts persist into the fruit stage surrounding the several sky-blue berries. Several flowers have already bloomed and several more fuzzy buds indicate it will flower for several more days.

Rainforest Field Trip - Luscious Lips

On many occasions the Phactor has tried to illustrate the problem plants have in dispersal of their pollen and seeds. The basic rule is pretty simple: attracting dispersers requires a display, and the bigger the display the better the dispersal. Another problem is that flowers are often either too small or too ephemeral to make a large, long-lasting display, so very often bracts, modified leaves associated with flowers, are used to produce larger, long-lasting displays for many plants. Some of these displays last long enough to also serve in seed dispersal, and this pair of red bracts belonging to Psychotria poeppigiana in the coffee family, looking quite like a pair of luscious lips, lasts long enough that after attracting pollinators to the rather small white flowers, they attract seed-dispersers to the blue fruits. With only 1 fruit remaining, their job is about done, and the lips aren't looking so kissable.

Rainforest Field Trip - Forest Decor

Rainforest is a high diversity ecosystem; there's a lot of green out there and most of the plants have the same problem of making your presence known. Since individuals plants are at a low density, the plant must have a means of signaling their presence to pollen dispersers who must then move to the next individual of the same species if pollination is to be achieved. Plants whose flowers are small have to find ways to advertising and one strategy employed by quite a few is to group small flowers together and put something big, gaudy, and colorful right next to them, usually a modified leaf, a bract. This plant (Warszewiczia coccinea) is called the wild poinsettia but it is a member of the coffee family (Rubiaceae) not the euphorb family of the true poinsettia, which is another neotropical plant. That's the trouble with common names; you just can't trust them. But they do both use this mechanism of placing a bright red bract next to a cluster of small rather nondescript flowers, so you don't miss this one out in the forest.