“Splendid and Suspended: Drymonia Up, Down and All Around”
12 - 1 pm in Selby's Cooley Theater
Please join us for a FREE noon lecture with former Selby intern and graduate student, Laura Clavijo on Monday, 4/23 from 12:00 – 1:00 pm in the Cooley Theater. Ms. Clavijo is a Graduate Student in the Department of Biological Sciences at The University of Alabama.
Drymonia belongs to the flowering family Gesneriaceae. Commonly known as gesneriads, this family is well recognized for their value as ornamentals due to their colorful and diverse flowers. A good example of this is the African violet and Episcias that are commonly cultivated in botanical gardens and by enthusiasts. The family is distributed throughout the tropics and about 1800 species grow in Tropical America.
The genus Drymonia, with 75 species, is one of the most morphologically variable and largest genera within the Tropical America Gesneriaceae, and its center of diversity is in Colombia and adjacent Ecuador. Most of the species of Drymonia have white campanulate flowers, pollinated by bees, and others have pouched red-orange flowers, pollinated by birds. This morphological variation in floral shapes challenges the delimitation of the genus and the recognition of species, and also raises interesting biological questions about the origin and evolution of those different shapes and their ecological relationships with bees and hummingbirds.