FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

This is interesting to me, since the only way to ascend all but one (i think) of the tepuis is via helicopter (which, ofc, didn’t exist in 1840)

So how did they climb the tepuis and discover them? I’m assuming that nutans was discovered on Mt. Roraima (the ascendable one) but how was tatei discovered in 1923 then? Tech still couldn’t have been that good, was it?

according to wiki:

"Heliamphora nutans was originally discovered in 1839 on Mount Roraima by the two brothers Robert and Richard Schomburgk,[3] although they did not collect samples to return to Europe. The plant was formally described by George Bentham in 1840,[1] becoming the type species of the genus. In 1881, David Burke was plant-hunting in the same area of British Guiana where he collected specimens of the plant and introduced it to England.["

also the now dead link (3) linking it to the 1839 discovery:

" Heliamphora nutans Benth.

There are around 18 species of carnivorous Heliamphora, all of which are endemic to Venezuela, Guyana and Brazil. Heliamphora nutans was the first species in the genus to be discovered. It was spotted by Robert and Richard Schomburgk on the slopes of Mount Roraima in October - November 1838. Robert Schomburgk was a German cartographer who had travelled to the region on behalf of the Royal Geographical Society in order to create the first detailed maps of British Guiana (now called Guyana), which was Britain's only colony in mainland South America."

Henry A Gleason a botanist in U.S. first published the Tatei species in 1931 prior to that: ("Gleason: the tyler-duida expedition in the torrey bulletin club volume 58: starts on pg. 368)

as for the actual expedition:
George Henry Hamilton Tate led a major expedition of the American Museum of Natural History to Cerro Duida in 1928–1929.[2][3] Named the Tyler-Duida Expedition, it was the first to reach the mountain's summit plateau and the first to climb a tepui of the Venezuelan Amazon.[4] Mount Duida frog was first collected during the expedition and is still not known from anywhere else, although it was formally described only 40 years later.[5][6] Although primarily a zoological expedition, much plant material was collected.[3] These herbarium collections were studied extensively by Henry Gleason, who formally described many of the mountain's plant species in a series of papers published in 1931.[7][8][9][10] This was followed by a number of important botanical explorations of Cerro Duida, first by Julian A. Steyermark in 1944 and later by Bassett Maguire in 1949 and 1950.[3][4] " via wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerro_Duida

if you have a JSTOR account (can read up to 6 items per month free on there) you can read the full 1930 publication from the the tyler-duida expedition itself as well as the later publicshed Gleason article about the particular plant

I just read through most of it really cool read! traveling by boats, ships, hiking, a series of over 100 ladders made from poles and vines. they had to carry over 3 tons of gear up that series of vine ladders!

interesting. I’m surprised it worked to be honest. Those tepuis are pretty vertical.

it describes how steep they are in the writings also and why they are cut off so jagged the way they are over time, I love reading old stuff like that!