Heliamphora sarracenioides — 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 rosette of erect pitchers 20 to 30 cm long and 3 to 5 cm wide at mid-height. The pitcher is infundibular in its lower half, ventricose in the middle and conical in the upper third. The distinctive organ sits on top: a triangular, upright lid 4 to 5 cm long and 3 to 4 cm wide, with a slightly recurved tip, arising directly from the back of the pitcher mouth without any constriction and often exceeding the mouth in width. Its inner face carries fairly evenly scattered glands up to 0.2 mm across. The uppermost quarter of the pitcher is completely hairless inside, with scattered glands; below that the hairy zone begins abruptly. Most plants are almost wholly red, some greenish with deep red veins. The scape reaches 60 cm and carries two or three flowers with lanceolate tepals 4 to 4.5 cm long and 1.7 to 2.2 cm wide, white to whitish pink.

Similar species

The lid decides. In relatives such as Heliamphora heterodoxa and Heliamphora folliculata that organ is smaller and narrower, and the glands on its inner face differ in size and distribution; here they are large and evenly spread. A second character is the glabrous zone beneath the rim: H. heterodoxa has a hairy inner surface there and a more funnel-shaped pitcher mouth. Confusion with the North American genus Sarracenia, from which the name comes, is ruled out geographically — that grows on another continent — but the resemblance explains why photographs of this plant are so often filed wrongly.

The trap and how it works

A pitfall whose superstructure is what catches the eye. The plant makes few digestive enzymes of its own; bacteria in the pitcher fluid break the prey down and the plant absorbs the nutrients released. The broad lid is the lure here: it carries numerous glands on its inner face and hangs over the opening, so an insect coming to the secretion stands directly above the trap. Below it comes first a completely smooth, hairless zone offering no grip, and only deeper the field of downward-pointing hairs. That combination — smooth just below the rim, hairs further down — is more sharply defined in this species than in its relatives.

Habitat and ecology

The flat summit of the table mountain (R4), above 2400 m: a landscape of bare sandstone with hollows in which acid peat and bog moss accumulate (W1) and where water stands among the rocks. The substrate is extremely poor in nitrogen and phosphorus and is continually leached by the near-daily rain. At this elevation the climate is cool and almost permanently wet, with cloud covering the summit much of the day and sharp swings between fierce sun in a clearing and gloom outside it. The known site is small and isolated, even by the standards of this genus.

Distribution and elevation

Endemic to Ptari-tepui in Bolívar state, Venezuela, and not found elsewhere; recorded elevations lie between about 2400 and 2450 m. The describers deliberately withheld the precise location of the site, and also which species grow alongside it — a precaution against collectors that, with a population of this size, is not excessive. The genus as a whole is confined to the table mountains of the Guiana Shield, in Venezuela, western Guyana and northern Brazil.

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 square is the only one-degree cell — 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. It shows where the species has been seen, not where it occurs: an empty square means nothing.

Forms and variation

No varieties or subspecies have been described within the species. There is colour variation without a taxonomic name: most plants have almost wholly red pitchers, while some stay greenish with deep red venation. No natural hybrids have been formally described, although several species of the genus grow on Ptari-tepui and hybridisation within Heliamphora is well documented on other mountains — indeed the type material of Heliamphora heterodoxa, from this same mountain, is now understood to be a hybrid. Cultivars are left aside here.

Where and when to see it

The summit is reachable only by helicopter or a hard multi-day trek, lies within Canaima National Park and is in practice visited only with a permit and a guide. Once on top the species is recognised by its silhouette: a rosette in which every leaf is topped by a broad, upright screen — a shape no other species of the genus shows. The red of the pitchers only comes out in direct light, so wait for a clearing. Tread on the wet peat as little as possible: the site is small and the vegetation slow to recover. The flowering period is not established in the literature.

Conservation status

The species has not been assessed for the IUCN Red List and appears in no CITES appendix. What is known makes it the most vulnerable of these five: at the description about two hundred mature plants were counted at the type locality, the population was judged healthy but restricted to a small and isolated area on one summit, and the describers expressly called it vulnerable. Against that, the mountain lies within a national park and World Heritage site, can be entered only with a permit, and the site has not been published. A formal assessment is therefore lacking, but not because nothing is known — rather because the figures come from a single count on a single visit, with no series of observations on which to base a trend.

Scientific name

Heliamphora sarracenioides | Carow, Wistuba & Harbarth, 2005

Described by Bernd Carow, Andreas Wistuba and Ulrike Harbarth in 2005, in Carnivorous Plant Newsletter 34(1): 4–6. The type area lies on Ptari-tepui in Bolívar state, Venezuela. The species name sarracenioides combines "Sarracenia" (the North American trumpet pitcher genus) with the Greek suffix -oides ("resembling") and refers to a pitcher shape reminiscent of Sarracenia.

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