Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Seeing the spathe of C. schulzei 'Kota Tinggi' finally

I had the good fortune to finally see the spathe of C. schulzei 'Kota Tinggi' during my recent trip to Peninsula Malaysia. After having a quick lunch of spicy cucumber + carrot salad, chilli brinjal, and curry squid with rice at a Malay stall near the jetty area at Mersing, we headed down to Kota Tinggi to visit the habitat of C. schulzei.
The habitat was a small stream running out of the forest. Both emersed and submersed specimens could be found in this stream with peat swamp bottom and pH of about 5.5
I had visited this habitat many times as we frequently passed by this area during our cryptocoryne hunting trips in Peninsula Malaysia but never had the good fortune to find any opened spathe during my previous visits. 2 spathes were found this time round. The kettle of the spathes was submersed in water or peat with the tube extending out to expose the limb.
The limb was yellowish in colour with slightly crumpled surface with a large (as compared to the surface of the limb) throat which was reddish in colour. The spathe looked rather typical when compared to the photographs shown on 'the crypt pages'. Below are some close up photographs of the external and internal of the spathe.
A small insect was flying out of the throat and later many escaped through the cut kettle. I had to borrow the photograph from my explorer friend as my hands were tied up with the cutting of the kettle while he focused his camera to take the shot once I opened up the kettle.
From this posting onwards, I will have to upload my photographs onto photobucket and then insert the photographs into this blog through adding the URL links as I have reached my free photograph storage space of 1.0GB allowed by google e-blogger website.
Happy 2011 Chinese New Year to all fellow cryptocoryne enthusiasts!

3 comments:

Hermes said...

I'd skip the Squid but love the curry. This is an important post for Crypt enthusiants - very well done, I upgraded my storage with blogger, very cheap indeed and much easier.

Gwynne Lim said...

Hello, I was given the URL for your blog by a friend for some research on Cryptocoryne that I'm doing.

Firstly, amazing photos and collections! Very impressive.

I have a question about those flies (that's what I think they are) that emerged from the kettle when you cut it. Do you commonly encounter them in wild-collected cryptocoryne inflorescences?

illumbomb said...

Hi, yes we have seen flies inside the kettles of cryptocorynes spathes collected in the wild as well as cultivated ones (http://illumbomb.blogspot.com/2009/04/c-xpurpurea-nothovar-purpurea-mersing.html). In fact, we have even seen other things such as caterpillers (http://illumbomb.blogspot.com/2009/11/cryptocoryne-sp-lingga-19-platinum-line.html , http://cryptoandbetta.blogspot.com/2009/10/c-sp-lingga-6-red-line.html) and ants (http://illumbomb.blogspot.com/2009/03/c-affinis-west-pahang.html).