Drosera bequaertii — Vorstman's Guide to the Carnivorous Plants

No photograph of this species under a Creative Commons licence or in the public domain is in the guide yet.

Identification

A small rosetted sundew with glandular trapping leaves and a scape from the centre of the rosette. A reliable, detailed description with measurements was not available for this text; Taton's original description and later herbarium studies are the appropriate sources. The measurement fields are left empty.

Similar species

The same region holds D. madagascariensis, D. affinis, D. elongata and D. katangensis, among others. The first three form stems with scattered leaves; D. katangensis is also a small rosette species and can only be separated with certainty using the description or herbarium material.

The trap and how it works

An active flypaper trap: stalked glands with sticky droplets hold small insects, after which the tentacles bend towards the prey and the glands secrete digestive enzymes.

Habitat and ecology

Wet, open places on the plateaux: waterlogged grassland, seeps and seasonally wet hollows in savanna and open miombo woodland (W4, W7, B6). Specific habitat data are scarce.

Distribution and elevation

South-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola. This guide's working list says 'Congo Basin'; the species, however, belongs not to the lowland rainforest of the basin itself but to its higher southern rim. Altitudinal limits were not found.

Recorded (one-degree cells)

Distribution based solely on records at GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), not on TDWG regions — those are often far larger than the actual range. The light halo is the area around a record, the dark core the record itself. The darker cells are 4 one-degree squares — roughly a hundred and ten kilometres — in which the species has been recorded, from all GBIF records. This is coarser than for most species because hardly any record of this plant carries an accurate coordinate: the locality of poached species is obscured at source. At this scale that obscuring disappears into the noise. The cells show where it has been seen, not where it occurs: an empty square means nothing.

Forms and variation

No varieties are recognised. As with many tropical African sundews the species is known from a limited number of herbarium collections, and its delimitation from related species deserves new study.

Where and when to see it

Field records are rare. Anyone visiting the plateaux of south-eastern Congo or Angola in the rainy season can look for small red rosettes in wet grassland; photographs and precise descriptions are valuable, but do not share exact localities publicly.

Conservation status

Assessed on the IUCN Red List as Vulnerable; not in CITES. The small known range and pressure on the wet grasslands of the plateaux, among other things from mining, agriculture and changes in the fire regime, are the reasons for that assessment.

Scientific name

Drosera bequaertii | Taton, 1945

Described by Taton in 1945, in Bulletin du Jardin botanique de l'État à Bruxelles, volume 17, p. 308. Democratic Republic of Congo (then Belgian Congo), collected on 8 June 1912 by J. Bequaert (holotype at herbarium BR, Brussels). Named after the collector J. Bequaert, who collected the type material — this is a near-certain reading given the type citation, though an explicit etymological statement was not found in a source.

World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP), via Plants of the World Online (POWO), Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.