#Pseudopanax

[drhoz]

#2226 - Pseudopanax ferox - Toothed Lancewood 

AKA fierce lancewood or horoeka.

And similar to the more common Pseudopanax crassifolius, that I covered for @purrdence's last visit, but with more prominently tooth-edged leaves. The juvenile leaves are narrow, a very dark grey-brown to grey-green colour, stiff and up to 40 cm long, and prominently toothed along the margins. This may have evolved to make them visibly and texturally unpalatable to Moa. After 10 to 15 years they transition to a much more normal-looking tree, now their foliage is out of reach to even the tallest giant flightless birds.

A mature toothed lancewood can be 6 metres tall with a trunk of 25 cm in diameter. The mature trunk has longitudinal grooves which sometimes twist slightly.

Increasingly popular as a small garden tree.

Other species of Pseudapanax are very different, as you'll see over coming weeks.

Craters of the Moon, Taupo Volcanic Zone, New Zealand

[herpsandbirds]

I see a bunch about the pukeko who are all over my back yard, but I'd love it if you posted some pics of the Takahe, their puppet headed bigger daddy. <3

Takahē (Porphyrio hochstetteri), family Rallidae, order Gruiformes, found in isolated areas of New Zealand

ENDANGERED.

photos: Pseudopanax (1,3), ZEALANDIA Ecosanctuary

[libraryofmoths]

Moth of the Week

North Island Lichen Moth

Declana atronivea

The North Island lichen moth or North Island zebra moth is in the family Geometridae. It was first described in 1865 by Frances Walker as Detunda atronivea, which was later changed to the Declana genus. It’s species name “atronivea” can be broken into the Latin words atro meaning black and nivea meaning snowy. Predictably, they are found in the North Island of New Zealand. Finally rounding out the name, the common name “zebra” comes from its black and white disruptive coloration and “lichen” comes from how this species camouflages itself by resting on lichen.

Description The forewings, head, and back are marked by a mottled white and black/dark brown pattern. It is very similar to the South Island lichen moth however, the North Island lichen moths’ wings are more mottled and present a rare form patterning in most: asymmetry. On its gray thorax is a black rectangular mark which also makes it differ from its neighbor. It’s hindwings and antennae are also gray with the hindwings having a gradient darkening towards the lower edge and a dark outline. The hindlegs follow the same gradient while the top two legs are black. Males have larger antennae while females have larger bodies.

Wingspan Range: 4 - 4.5 cm (≈1.6 - 1.8 in)

Diet and Habitat This species eats plants in the Araliaceae family, a family of flowering plants. Two examples of this are Five Finger (Neopanax arboreus) and Lacewood (Pseudopanax crassifolius). Adult moths do not feed.

This species is endemic to, or only found on, New Zealand. It is found exclusively in the North Island:

- Rare in Whanganui region (1913)

- Common around Mount Taranaki and Mount Ruapehu (1913)

- Also found in Wellington, Otaki and Napier

Mating Adults emerge from their cocoons in February and March and the eggs are laid singly in late October. Adult moths presumably mate near these timeframes. They begin green, transition to blue with purple spots in a week, and become a light purple before hatching. Hatching takes 11 days.

Predators This species avoids predation by camouflaging itself against lichen. The black and white pattern of its head, back, and forewings (which hide the hindwings while at rest) blend into the mottled surroundings. Additionally, the pattern creates an effect called disruptive colorations which breaks up the animals outline and makes them harder to spot. This works against potential predators such as birds.

Fun Fact Not only does the wing patterning vary on an individual North Island lichen moth’s forewings but even between moths of the same species.

(Source: Wikipedia, Entomological Society of New Zealand, Moth Identification)

[hamishpetersen]

Garden for JC

A garden I designed and planted for a friend using entirely Aotearoa native perennials on one side of the steps, and mediterranean groundcover herbs on the other. Includes:

Veronica vernicosa / odora / buxifolia (Koromiko) Small grasses i.e. Carex comans / buchanii / flagellifera Libertia ixiodes / grandiflora (Mikoikoi) Acanea Purpurea / caesiiglauca (Piripiri) Leptinella 'Platts Black' Ophiopogon planiscapus Pittosporum / Lemonwood (Tarata) Pseudopanax crassofoliu / lancewood (Horoeka)

creeping Thymus and Rosemarinus species Salvia officinalus Origanum vulgare etc etc.

[life-around-me-yura15cbx]

Pseudopanax lessonii, or houpara, is a New Zealand native tree belonging to the family Araliaceae. Coastal tree with fleshy hand-shaped leaves. Endemic. Three Kings to Poverty Bay and northern Taranaki.

17B Northcross Drive, Oteha, Auckland 0632

7PJC+QP9 Auckland

-36.7181000, 174.7218440

[jillraggett]

Plant of the Day

Friday 20 December 2019

The long, bronze evergreen leaves of Pseudopanax ferox (toothed lancewood) have a jagged edge which evolved to protect the plant from grazing animals. The narrow leaves radiate from a thin trunk in the juvenile phase while mature plants produce shorter, spreading, dark green leaves. This amazing New Zealand plant in the mature phase produces umbels of green-white, star-shaped flowers with black berries on the female plants. 

Jill Raggett

[wenbochenphoto]

A juvenile lacewood (Pseudopanax crassifolius) in Nelson Lakes National Parks South Island NZ. It can stay like this for up to 20 years, then branches out and shortens its leaves, meanwhile loses the teeth on leaf margin as well. There are theories to explain this, one of them is to avoid to be eaten by moa, the prehistoric giant bird in NZ. 

[gedditor]

Ancient vegetation

The lancewood or horoeka (left) is a weird one. Its long, saw-like leaves point downward from a sharp central point for the first 30 or so years of its life. Then they turn upward, like these ones, and gradually become shorter and rounder over some years, until the plant comes to look much more ordinary. And as for the cabbage tree (right), it’s really a giant lily.

[sitting-on-me-bum]

Moreaki Boulders, New Zealand

The Moreaki boulders are huge spherical boulders scattered along Koekohe Beach in New Zealand. According to Maori legend, the boulders are eel baskets washed up from an enormous, sunken canoe. Scientists explain the boulders as calcite concretions formed about 65 million years ago.

Photo: (Wikimedia/ Pseudopanax)

[drhoz]

The Great ACT-NSW-NZ Trip, 2023-2024 - St. Arnaud

After getting across Cook Strait without being shipwrecked (the weather was actually quite pleasant compared to some of the unholy gales that come through the gap, with the wind merely howling), we started our explorations of Te Waipounamu, the Island of Greenstone Waters. Pounamu is such a beautiful and useful stone that the Māori named the entire island after it.

Europeans called it South Island, or archaically New Munster. It covers 150,437 square kilometres, making it the world's 12th-largest island. We stopped at the Omaka Aviation Museum, which was worth it, but our first night was spent at St. Arnaud, formerly Rotoiti, a tiny alpine village.

It's certainly surrounded by mountains, and shows some really nice alpine geomorphology - hanging valleys left where subsiduary glaciers got cut off by the larger glaciers in the main valley, scree slopes where the greywacke of the mountains is disintigrating, and alpine lakes like Lake Rotoiti itself, formed when the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age and left behind huge piles of pebbles, gravel, and boulders to dam the meltwater.

On the other hand St. Arnaud has also been built right on top of a considerably larger geological feature - the Alpine Fault. This tectonic boundary between the Australian and Pacific Plates runs for over 600km, and is one of the fastest moving faultlines in the world, moving, on average, almost 40mm a year. Geological formations that originally straddled the fault are now 480km apart. Unfortunately most of that movement happens during huge earthquakes every few hundred years - the last big one on the Alpine Fault happens around 1717, rupturing 400km of the fault at once.

Over the last 12 million years a significant upwards element to the fault movement has been added, creating the Southern Alps. Most of what is now the South Island got pushed 20 kilometers up, whereupon New Zealand's weather promptly ground it 16 kilometers back down again. The assorted rubble forms the plains on the east and southern coast, or got swept north by prevailing currents on the west coast. Exposed basement rock on the South Island is mostly greywacke, or heavily metamorphised rocks such as schist from even deeper. That's where the greenstone originally formed.

Anyway, the next big quake will probably trash St. Arnaud completely, and cut every road across the mountains for months. Happily that didn't happen on this trip - @purrdence had enough problems with a cyclone cutting roads and trainlines last time.

The original forest around St. Arnaud is mostly Antarctic Beech (Nothofagus sp.) and forms the basis of a unique and seriously threatened ecosystem. I'll tell you all about that over the upcoming posts.

Here's some species I've covered before.

[herpsandbirds]

Tūī (Prosthemadera novaeseelandiae), perched on blooming kōwhai, family Meliphagidae, New Zealand

photograph by Pseudopanax 

[plantedagendaworks]

Unitec student work. A close up of the amazing coloration of the Pseudopanax ferox (lancewood) used in our “Reflections on a Black Landscape” show garden, which featured only three plant species held in gabion planters floating over a reflection pool and filled with coal and charred logs.

“Reflections on a Black Landscape” Ellerslie Flower Show. 2006.

[hungovergames-blog1]

flora und fauna neuseeland (4)

Other inhabitants of rocky alpine sites are many species of the genus Hebe. The genus Hebe has its main focus of distribution in New Zealand and belongs to the family Scrophulariaceae. On rocky and stony sites all over the South Island, up to an altitude of 1600m, one can also find the "South Island Edelweiss" (Leucogenes grandiceps), whose leaves are small and woolly. The "North Island Edelweiss" Leucogenes leontopodium is often found in large quantities above 1250m and prefers stony locations.

Holidays and public holidays in New Zealand

In the Fjordland Marine Reserve are the world's largest, approx. One of the rarer small conspicuous trees of the lowland bush, which is also found on both islands, is the aralia plant Pseudopanax ferox (Toothed lancewood). The trunk seems to be composed of strands and the leaves of the young trees, which can be up to 50cm long, are covered with teeth. For the vegetation of the high mountains the geographical position is very important, it interacts with the local mountain climate and so a very special species composition develops in each high mountain range. The vegetation in the mountains changes according to the different altitude levels. |}{

>Coprosoma acerosa, which grows flat and almost cushion-like with many crossing branches and narrow small leaves, colonizing the sandy areas of all main islands.characteristic for New Zealand are the ferns, which are represented with about 150 species, of which about 150 are represented by the genus Celmisia. Besides the genus Celmisia, there are also a number of daisies, e.g.

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{/ul> Read more about campervan hire New Zealand here. Also the introduced Possum (Fuchkusu), which was imported from Australia for fur breeding, spread rapidly. Meanwhile the New Zealand government is doing everything possible to get this plague under control and lays traps all over the country. This measure is used to estimate the population and to control the spread. It is not uncommon to find run over possums on New Zealand's roads, as every "Kiwi" considers it his duty as a driver to stop when possums cross the roads.

and South Seas

the Snow Marguerite (Dolichoglottis scorzoneroides), this too is a mighty plant over half a meter in size with fleshy leaves up to 20cm long. New Zealand has a high number of different vegetation zones. The climatic conditions range from subtropical in the north to cool temperate alpine in the south, accordingly different habitats can be found. Tree ferns with species of the genera Dicksonia and Cyathea and the Nik

[life-around-me-yura15cbx]

Pseudopanax crassifolius × lessonii

Two of the species – Pseudopanax crassifolius, horoeka, lancewood, and Pseudopanax lessonii, houpara, coastal five-finger – hybridise wherever they occur together, be this in the wild or in cultivation.

Pannill Place, Oteha, Auckland 0632

7PGC+R25 Auckland

-36.7229780, 174.7201110

[agavex]

Pseudopanax ferox. Morrab Gardens, Penzance, Cornwall. September 2017.

[biomedres]

Use of the Leaf-Aqueous Extract of Pseudopanax Arboreus (Araliaceae) (L.F. Phillipson) is Void of Toxic Effects - BJSTR Journal

Use of the Leaf-Aqueous Extract of Pseudopanax Arboreus (Araliaceae) (L.F. Phillipson) is Void of Toxic Effects by Egbe B Besong* in Biomedical Journal of Scientific & Technical Research

https://biomedres.us/fulltexts/BJSTR.MS.ID.006223.php

Although plants may be effective in treating some ailments, they may contain potent chemical compounds that could cause adverse effects and toxicity. It is therefore essential to ensure the clinical efficacy, quality and safety of any medicinal plant preparation before making it available to consumers. Psudopanax arboreus (Araliaceae) has scientifically been proven to have sex-enhancing potentials and is capable of reversing male sexual dysfunction; but its toxicological profile has never been assessed. The present study focused on evaluating the toxicological effect of its leaf-aqueous extract in rats. In acute toxicity, a total of 21 rats were divided into 3 groups of 7 rats each, with animals of group 1 administered 10 ml/kg distilled water, while groups 2 and 3 received 2000 and 5000 mg/kg of the aqueous extract, respectively. In sub-acute toxicity, a total of 40 rats of either sex were divided into 4 groups of10 animals each. Animals of group 1 received 10ml/kg of distilled water, while groups 2, 3, 4 were given the aqueous extract at 250 mg/kg, 500 mg/kg and 1000 mg/kg, respectively. Single oral administration provoked no clinical signs of toxicity and death in the tested doses; hence, the LD50 value of the extract was found to be greater than 5000mg/kg. Similarly, the 28 days treatment did not cause any significant difference in body weight, water/food intake, organ weights, hematological and biochemical parameters between the extracted-treated animals and the control group. It can be concluded that the leaf-aqueous extract of P. arboreus is well tolerated. 

For more articles on Journals on Biomedical Science please click here

bjstr

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