MY YEAR PURSUING PUYAS IN THE ANDES

by Rachel Schmidt Jabaily

In some of the highest reaches of the Andes, the air is so thin that hummingbirds cease to hover and instead cling to the fuzzy columns of puya plants while feeding on the abundant nectar produced by otherworldly colored flowers. I, too, have found myself breathing the thin air of the Andes and clinging to the remarkable plants as I tracked down specimens in South America while doing research for my doctoral thesis.

My quest actually began two years ago, when I came to The Huntington to get my first glimpse of puyas. I was wrapping up my first year of graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, having immersed myself in the field of systematic botany, or the organization and evolution of plant diversity. My colleagues and I construct the relationships between species, genera, or other taxonomic units, and then interpret this phylogeny — a “family tree” of sorts — to tell stories about evolution. We try to figure out how plants adapted or diversified in the past, all the while wondering how current environmental changes might trigger future adaptation. I was already enamored of bromeliads — a large neotropical family of plants that include puyas as well as pineapples, Spanish moss, and many houseplants, but I wanted to focus on a genus that would be manageable as a graduate-level project. When I caught The Huntington’s spectacular puya bloom following the particularly wet winter of 2005, I knew I had settled on my group.

Rachel Schmidt Jabaily proudly holds a specimen of Puya asplundii outside the Cotacachi Cayapas Ecological Reserve in Ecuador in October 2006. In April she took a break from her travels to catch The Huntington’s 21 species of Puya in bloom. Her experience in South America helped her clarify the identifications of several specimens in the Desert Garden. Photo by Edwin Narvaez.

Puyas are the most ubiquitous and charismatic group of bromeliads in the high Andean regions called the páramo and puna, grass-dominated ecosystems. (The páramo is farther north and is wetter than the puna.) The plants are spectacular when flowering. When their flowers are spent, the petals twist into a tight spiral, perhaps to protect the developing seeds. Most of the plants are quite large (three to six feet tall or more when in bloom) and can easily be seen from the road, a plus when paying a taxi driver by the hour to take you collecting. The plants are also entirely terrestrial, hence no need to climb trees, though they do tend to love hanging off particularly precarious road cuts or cliffs.

The Huntington Desert Garden has been around for 100 years and has an excellent collection of mature puya specimens, primarily from Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia. These plants were collected in an era free of restrictions that now govern the movement of plants from one country to another. In today’s world, I first had to fill out innumerable forms and befriend any number of people via the Internet who could help me navigate the startlingly complex — or alternatively non-existent — environmental bureaucracy of various countries.

My goal was to collect in the wild as many species of Puya as possible. More specifically, I would press and dry leaves and flowers, putting small sections of leaf in silica gel for later DNA extraction. After sequencing their DNA, I could tell stories about the evolution of the group. How is this group related to other bromeliads and how are the various species — with different body shapes and floral displays — related to each other? Can knowledge of evolutionary history explain or predict certain physical attributes of the plants? Where and when did this group originate and under what geological and ecological conditions did it evolve?

Of course there are drawbacks to collecting this group. Because of their large size and spiny leaves, puyas are extremely hard to press and mount on the standard-sized papers used in herbaria, or plant libraries. The more than 200 recognized species are relatively poorly studied and undercollected in almost their entire ranges, and for many species little is known beyond the description of the plant and a few localities. Perhaps most difficult for me, puyas live across an immense span of land, from the bogs of Costa Rica through the Gran Sabana of Venezuela, throughout much of the Andes up to 14,500 feet in elevation and down to the coast of central Chile. Each of the countries has its own plant collecting rules, transportation infrastructure, and a variety of quirks that makes fieldwork both delightful and frustrating. By the time I set my itinerary for my travels, I knew I had my work cut out for me.

BOLIVIA, MARCH 2006

Roberto Vásquez, an expert on orchids and bromeliad flora, picked me up at the airport in Santa Cruz. I didn’t realize at the time how lucky I was to be with a local expert who could drive his own vehicle. He has worked in many areas of Bolivian business and currently owns a large and successful dairy farm outside Santa Cruz, which leaves him with lots of time to pursue his real passion. Many times in my travels throughout South America I met talented botanists who have careers in other areas, presumably because it is very difficult to make a living as a biologist.

We drove throughout the Department of Santa Cruz alongside the lush vegetation that marks the transition from lowland forests to the higher Andean puna. Bolivia has a much lower population density than other countries I would visit, and the roads were mostly empty save for occasional livestock as we traveled up lush mountainsides and down into dry valleys full of giant cactus.

I was surprised to learn that several of the Puya species in Santa Cruz were expanding their range as a result of deforestation. Puya plants can be completely shaded out by dense forests; they grow best in open grasslands. Since much of the original forests have been cleared for grazing land, Puya atra and P. nana have begun to spring up in pastures well beyond the cliffs and high elevations of their earlier recorded habitats. Other species of Puya are threatened by human activities, but that would be seen more obviously in Ecuador.

My first trip to Bolivia was short but gave me the confidence I needed for subsequent trips to other countries, where I would have to assume a greater role in planning the trips. I had collected 10 different species in just a few days. I knew I had to make plans to return to find the other 50 or so in the higher and drier puna region.

ECUADOR, OCTOBER 2006

Fall kicked off with my preliminary exams, freeing me for the rest of the semester to pursue my research in earnest. I had spent a lot of time with the Bolivian specimens, interspersing my study of Puya characteristics with a quick trip to The Huntington in the spring. I was beginning to get a sense of the “species concept” in Puya, or the breakdown of individual plants with varied morphological characteristics into distinct species that interbreed and behave as biological units. I tested this knowledge in the field in Ecuador as I collected several species that could be considered distinct or similar to other species, depending on how I looked at them.

After spending a week in Quito acclimating to the 9,100-foot elevation, I joined my counterpart Edwin Narvaez of the Quito Botanical Garden on a bus trip north to the cool, wet páramo of El Angel on the Colombian border. The most prominent plants in this high grassy land were the frailejones, or Espeletia plants — tall, fuzzy members of the sunflower family. Interspersed among them were giant, spiny rosettes of Puya hamata, the largest species in Ecuador.

This species is monocarpic, meaning it dies after flowering and does not produce vegetative offshoots like most other Puya species and many other garden plants. So to get a sample of it, we essentially had to kill this majestic plant, which had been growing for at least 30 years, judging from its size.

To keep things in perspective,  cutting one plant down does far less damage than the local practice of burning the páramo. Hundreds of acres of this rare landscape are burned every year, in part to maximize grazing opportunities but also because the local people believe fire brings rain. While some plants survive and even thrive following a burning, others, including this type of large puya, do not. Even though this particular region is protected, a shortage of government workers here and elsewhere makes it difficult to en-force the law among the burgeoning highland population.

I am still hopeful. My host families appreciated the beauty of the puya samples that I hauled back in sacks after a long day in the field. After hacking away at the giant plants with a machete — preserving the least amount of plant material in my press to capture the key characteristics of the species — I had mounds of flowers and plants left over. I gave whole plants to the women to transplant in their gardens, and I gave the flowers to the children, telling them in my childlike Spanish about the colibri (hummingbird) that drinks from the flowers and the oso de anteojos (spectacled bear) who loves to tear apart the plants to eat the sugary leaf sheaths.

The Ecuadorian trip was a complete success. We collected almost all of the 35 species known in the country and caught more than half of them in flower. I now had a good sampling of plants from the wetter páramo ecosystem, and I was eager to compare them to puyas from drier ecosystems farther south.

ARGENTINA, NOVEMBER 2006

I reunited with my new husband of four months for a quick but much needed Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. We then flew to Córdoba, Argentina, with Diego Gutierrez, an Argentine botanist studying small highland sunflowers. Diego did not drive, so my husband got behind the wheel of our rental car in Córdoba’s midday traffic.

Traveling was a joy once we were out of the city, barreling past the stunning mountains, vineyards, and cactus-filled quebradas (dry valleys) of northwest Argentina. Collecting, though, was a different story. In Ecuador, I had a puya book complete with GPS locations compiled by rose exporter and major bromeliad aficionado José Manzanares. In Argentina, however, some species had only been collected by hardy botanists on mule train in the 1930s. It soon became apparent why: there are very few roads in the mountains of western Argentina, since the majority of the population lives in the lowlands. Sometimes the best I had to go on was the name of a nearby town or mountain range. I despaired in realizing that there were no roads to take us the additional 5,000 feet of elevation to the plants’ habitat.

On another collecting day, on a search for the one known population of hairy yellow-flowered Puya yakespala, we couldn’t get low enough. We were in the high, dry puna grassland just south of the Bolivian border, feeling the effects of the altitude and dodging the occasional sheep or llama herd crossing the road. We started on a road that quickly deteriorated to one lane hanging off the side of improbable cliffs. I’d been on similar roads in Ecuador but had managed to nap through it all since it was the taxi driver’s job to worry about such things. But when it is your husband driving your rental car, sleep is not an option. We crept along for more than 20 miles before we saw the monstrous plant (without flowers, though). At day’s end we were tired but triumphant, with DNA and pressed leaves in the car. The sheep-spine stew we had for our victory dinner was a tasty reward.

Even so, I found only eight species in Argentina, several of which are living at The Huntington. I finally came to the realization that collecting all the species of Puya for my thesis was not going to be possible. I also realized that if I scaled back my ambitious project, I could still get a basic sense of evolution within the group. Future botanists can help fill in the rest. 

CHILE, DECEMBER 2006

From Córdoba, we flew over Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the New World (22,841 feet), to Santiago, Chile, rented another car, and headed north up the spectacular coastline. Central Chile has a climate and vegetation very similar to that of coastal California. The six Puya species in Chile are unique in that they grow at very low elevations and generally are abundant and easy to find. They also are very well represented at The Huntington. While it might be tempting to extract DNA from specimens in a botanical garden, fieldwork assures the genetic purity of samples while giving me the opportunity to take notes on habitat and morphological variation. As I wrapped up my 2006 travels I looked forward to collecting samples from the remaining countries I hoped to visit: Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, along with a return trip to Bolivia.

The most perfect day of collecting was in the swanky beach town of Zapallar, north of Viña del Mar. Below the mansions and sprawling gardens, past the little shack selling fresh seafood, and next to the nesting area of flocks of cormorants and pelicans, was a peninsula covered in shiny purple-flowered Puya venusta.

The plants were in full bloom, surrounded by colorful songbirds, small iridescent wasps, and the largest species of hummingbird on earth, Patagonia gigas. This rather dull-colored bird is about the size of a house finch but has very long wings. The birds seemed to appreciate the break from hovering offered by the perches of long tips of Puya chilensis growing nearby. It had been my dream to see these birds pollinating puyas, and now they were our companions as we drew in closer to the magnificent Chilean specimens.

Rachel Schmidt Jabaily is a doctoral candidate in botany at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As a Mayers Fellow, she helped identify puyas in The Huntington’s Desert Garden in April 2007. She is the first botanist to receive a fellowship from The Huntington’s Research Division.

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