Photographed July 21, 2018, 4:41pm, Nikon D810 camera, no tripod.
Photogenic mushroom growing on the base of Guadua bamboo trees along a small river, several kilometers south of Teleman, Guatemala.
The brown part was covered with scores of insects.
Posted July 24, 2018
4-petaled flowers and 4-rows sepalos.
Here is a sample of the 4-petalled flowers we have found growing in remote areas of Guatemala.
4-petalled flowers were used to decorate Late Classic (Tepeu 2) polychrome vases, bowls, and plates throughout the Peten and adjacent areas.
I discovered two bowls with 4-petalled flower designs in Burial 196, Tomb of the Jade Jaguar, Tikal Str. 5D-76, in 1965, while a Harvard student working as an architectural and photographic student intern on the University of Pennsylvania Tikal Project.
4-petaled flowers and 4-rows sepalos.
I have always been curious what actual flowers were the models. My ICA Salamanca 2018 lecture on this topic will be posted next week. Then later we will issue a PDF showing the entire list of 4-petalled flowers that exist in Guatemala, and indicate which we have found and photographed, and which we still need to locate so we can photograph them.
We have discovered totally unexpected epigraphic and iconographic documentation during the recent 6 years of photographic field trips in every eco-system of Guatemala.
Posted July 20, 2018
Wild vanilla vine, Izabal, Guatemala, April 8, 2018, Erick Flores, FLAAR Mesoamérica.
Canon EOS 1Dx Mark II , EF100mm f/2.8 Macro USM Lens, f/10, 1/125, ISO 125
While in Izabal several weeks ago, courtesy of the many hospitable people we know there, we found two areas with wild vanilla orchid vines. One was at water level (literally), alongside the Izabal waterways. The second was about 10 km away, in the hills south of Lago Izabal.
In each location there were “wild vanilla orchid vines everywhere around us.”
Experienced orchid botanist Fredy Archilla is letting us know when other vanilla orchid vines elsewhere may bloom. Plus we have several contacts who have told us about wild vanilla vines that their friends know about.
It is essential NOT to collect wild vines from the forests without special permission. It is even more helpful that the trees are not chopped down: vanilla orchid vines require trees to grow, flower, and produce vanilla pods.
More to come, but we definitely want to have Guatemala given more space in ALL future articles and monographs on vanilla orchids of the world. The Maya of Tikal and of El Mirador had orchid vines. We estimate wild vanilla vines can be found at Parque Nacional Yaxha Nakum Naranjo.
We are also working on Muc (Orejuela, a seasoning) and wild bamboo native to Guatemala… yes, bamboo of the Mayan areas: not bamboo from Asia.
Posted May 8, 2018
Canon EOS 6D, 300mm, f/7.1, 1/1400, ISO 500, 11:56am, Feb. 11 2018, Bocas de Polochic River, Melanny Quiñonez, FLAAR.
More Ceiba pentandra trees are visible along the Rio Polochic from Lake Izabal towards Panzos than almost anywhere else in the country. I personally experienced more ceiba trees this one day (Feb. 11th_2018) than in my previous 54 years of being in front of Ceiba trees throughout Mesoamerica.
More than 25% were flowering. Ceiba pentandra trees are very individual and independent of whether they will flower any given year. And you can have several ceiba trees together in the same field and some will be in flower yet others will have full leaf growth (which means no flowering whatsoever that month or perhaps that year).
I was also very surprised to note that many of these Ceiba pentandra trees were growing in seasonal swamp areas. A few were physically adjacent to the Rio Polochic (as I would expect their relatives, Pachira aquatica). Although there are lots of Pachira aquatica trees around Lake Izabal, I did not notice one single zapoton along the Rio Polochic (whose water is the source of Lake Izabal!).
I took over 400 photographs: 60mm Sigma lens, 100mm Zeiss lens, 200mm using a Nikon D810; 400mm, and 600mm Nikkor prime telephoto lenses with a Nikon D5 on a Wimberley WH-200 gimbal tripod head II on a 20+ year old awesome quality Gitzo tripod.
Posted Feb. 15, 2018
FLAAR Reports has two divisions; you are now on one of the web sites of the tropical Mesoamerica flora and fauna team. If you are interested in wide-format inkjet printers, we have an entire network to explain this technology: www.wide-format-printers.org
There is also a growing team of illustrators and graphic designers who do educational children’s books (to show the world the remarkable plants and animals of 2000 years of Mayan civilization in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador).
To learn more about animals of the Mayan world, take a look at our www.maya-ethnozoology.org.
To see our newly launched cartoon book web site, look at our
www.mayan-characters-value-based-education.orgwww.mayan-characters-value-based-education.org.
Here you can see a video of Dr Nicholas interacting with a 350 pound tapir and her spotted baby.
Posted Dec 22, 2017
This is how a plant gets ready to disperse its seeds: in this species, windblown, using silk-like fluff to float in the wind.
This is Asclepias curassavica, a tropical milkweed plant of Mexico, Guatemala and other Neotropical countries, which I call the monarch butterfly flower. We raise this in the FLAAR Mayan Ethnobotanical Garden in Guatemala.
Every several months we at FLAAR Mesoamerica, cooperating with FLAAR (in USA), start new research themes. This week Elena suggested seed dispersal by birds and mammals. So I will add a co-project: seed dispersal techniques of plants themselves.
Here in Guatemala the giant Ceiba pentandra trees have silk-like kapok fluff to act as a floating parachute. So the seeds blow in the wind several to many meters away from the parent tree.
We will first identify all trees and bushes and plants of Guatemala which use fluff-like material to facilitate the wind blowing the seeds as far as possible. One of the obvious plants is the “monarch butterfly flower” seed: Asclepias species. We grow these in our Mayan Ethnobotanical Research Garden precisely to attract monarch butterflies.
Already five years ago we studied explosive seed dispersal in depth.
We have a video showing these pods exploding to disperse their seeds.
So season by season we will gradually add new seed dispersal themes to our research. We specialize in high-definition, well illuminated digital photography. The picture shown here is with a Nikon D810 because our Nikon D5 is mainly useful when we need super high ISO or burst-shutter setting. Erick Flores did 5X close-ups of the Asclepias seeds which we will be glad to publish as soon as outside funding comes our way.
To learn about digital camera equipment and increase your knowledge from our digital photography experience, visit www.digital-photography.org.
Posted Nov. 29, 2017
