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Pinguicula baezensis
Some species carry their whole history in their name. Pinguicula baezensis is named after the Báez river in the far east of Cuba, and beyond that river it has never been found: all known material comes from one stretch of bank between Camarones and Mina Amores in Baracoa municipality. It is one of the last Cuban butterworts described by Siegfried Jost Casper, based on living plants collected in 2002 and grown on at Jena Botanical Garden.
No photograph of this species under a Creative Commons licence or in the public domain is in the guide yet.
Identification
A flat rosette of entire, fleshy leaves, densely set above with stalked glands that give the blade a wet, glossy look. Slender scapes rise from the centre, each with a single two-lipped, spurred flower. The plant sits low against wet bank soil and rock and covers no more than a palm's width. The species was described from material taken from the same banks as Pinguicula bissei, and the separation between the two rests on measurements and details of flower and seed; in the field you are largely dependent on careful photographs and a precise locality.
Similar species
The main confusion is with Pinguicula bissei, which lives on literally the same river, and more broadly with the other small-flowered butterworts of eastern Cuba. In the field they cannot be reliably separated by eye; in this company determination belongs with a description, a hand lens and preferably seed material. What you can establish with certainty is that you are dealing with a butterwort: the glistening glandular coat, the entire rosette leaves and the spurred two-lipped flower leave no doubt about the genus.
The trap and how it works
Like all butterworts this species catches with a two-part glandular coat. Stalked glands carry a droplet of glue lying on the leaf like dew; sessile glands, sunk into the surface, release digestive enzymes once prey rests on them. The dissolved food is then absorbed through the same stomata-free leaf skin. Along a mountain river the prey is mostly small fliers swarming above the water. It is a slow process: a medium-sized midge is reduced to an empty husk in a day or two, and that husk washes away with the first downpour. What stands out in rosettes this small is how little leaf is needed: a rosette the size of a coin can process dozens of insects in a season, simply because each leaf is used several times over.
Habitat and ecology
The habitat is the wet bank of a mountain river: rock and earth faces kept permanently damp by spray and seepage, in half shade under the bank vegetation. Labelled material comes from about one hundred and fifty-five metres above sea level, so from the low hills behind Baracoa rather than the high cloud forest. The substrate in this bank strip is constantly rinsed, so little is left for ordinary herbs and a carnivorous plant has the advantage — exactly the pattern that marks the whole Cuban group. What is absent matters too: on the wet, repeatedly rinsed bank strip the large herbs and grasses that elsewhere swamp everything are missing, and that lack of competition is as decisive for a small butterwort as the moisture itself.
Distribution and elevation
Endemic to Cuba and known from a single river system in Guantánamo province, Baracoa municipality: the banks of the Báez between Camarones and Mina Amores. The area lies in the Moa–Baracoa massif on the edge of Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, in a landscape of metal-rich soils, steep stream valleys and some of the highest rainfall in the Caribbean. There are no reliable reports from elsewhere; the range is therefore among the smallest in this whole book.
- Native
Forms and variation
No wild subspecies or varieties are recognised, and with a range of a few river kilometres there is hardly room for geographical differentiation. The open questions are taxonomic: how sharp the boundary is between this species and the other butterworts of the same river system, and whether closer study of seeds and flower measurements confirms the present arrangement. For the guide that means treating the name as a working hypothesis awaiting precise field data, not as a closed case.
Where and when to see it
There is little to be searched here without a guide and without permission: the area is remote, protected and hard going. Anyone who gets there searches along the water itself, on the permanently wet strip where moss and liverwort stay green all year, not on the drier slopes above. Get low and look into the light so the glandular coat lights up. Photograph flower, spur and leaf separately and record the exact spot; in this group that is the difference between a sighting and a usable record.
Conservation status
The species has not been assessed for the global IUCN Red List and is not listed in CITES. What is known amounts to a remarkably thin file: one river system, one collecting event as the basis for the description, and almost no further field data. That the surroundings lie largely inside protected land is favourable; unfavourable are mining on the region's nickel-bearing soils and the vulnerability of bank populations to extreme flow peaks. The absence of an international category here follows directly from the shortage of data, not from a comfortable situation.
Scientific name
Pinguicula baezensis | Casper, 2019
Described by Siegfried Jost Casper in 2019, in Englera 35: 1–126. The type area lies in Guantánamo Province, Cuba, on the banks of the Río Báez, between Camarones and Mina Amores, at 155 metres elevation. The species name baezensis refers to the Río Báez near Baracoa, Cuba, where the type material was collected.
World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP), via Plants of the World Online (POWO), Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.