The Cactus Trip Diaries

Angie reported some problems with yesterday’s photo album, where pictures became corrupted during the upload process. I have now corrected this.

Today was another one of those days where we proved that our sanity is in doubt. We drove 100 km to see one taxon (and found another as a bonus) and then drove 100 km back!

The taxon in question is Micranthocereus hofackerianus about which Marlon has an article in the BCSS Forum, going back to 2007. Not sure if it has been published in paper form yet.

You can check it out at:
http://www.bcss.org.uk/forum/read.php?41,75226

He reports that the plants are threatened by a sand quarry and indeed it seems that three such small operations are active one way or another. We managed to find a total of four plants during the 45 minutes at the first quarry, mainly because the first plant we saw was in flower. The second quarry, some 200 m farther along the track, was now a landfill site with rubbish dumped and being sorted by an army of recyclers for tin cans and plastic bottles. The smell did not encourage further investigation here. Another 200 m and a track to the left (by foot only) and we were at a third sandpit, snow white quartz sand here at the foot of a rocky hill. Plenty of Stephanocereus leutzelburgii here, but M. hofackerianus? Not a trace.

I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

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