Huancabamba

[trucha]

This is intended as a space to discuss the famous Huancabamba, its plants and its people as well as a nice place to post maps, links, photos or discussions of the other places with the same name that were referred to by Michael in another post.

More than one place with the same name should not have to create confusion. For instance if I am in Dublin California I have no trouble telling I am not in Ireland but if just saying I went to Dublin this can at least potentially cause confusion depending on what other information we have available.

Including department names for Peruvian locations is always a very helpful approach for avoiding that sort of confusion.

It would be great to learn those three Huancabamba locations referred to by Michael so that we can find them useful in this regards.

The remote and hard to get to location favored by shamans was claimed by Friedberg to have been chosen to avoid persecution due to its remoteness and difficulty in easily getting to. (One single sketchy mountain road in and out)

This would have been even more of an issue in the days of the Inquisitions when "questioning" by church representatives commonly involved beatings and torture for periods lasting for sometimes several years but the anthropologist Claudine Friedberg reported users hid their best plants out of sight even in the late 1950s to avoid persecution.

The psychiatric researcher Dr. Carlos Guittierez-Noriega made a similar comment around the same time frame and denounced the traditional San Pedro using shamans in the area as a bunch of charlatans and sexual perverts who were continually experimenting with psychoactive plants.

I would also love Michael's and other people's opinion on how "peruvianus Huancabamba" fits into peruvianus or pachanoi or if it does.

I am starting to not know what to think except that the offspring from Mesa Garden seeds do not all resemble each other. Mine from Oasis, grown from MG seed, looks like a rather typical and common Peruvian pachanoi but I have seen others that do not.

Of course even a single seed pod can hold the seeds for offspring from multiple pollen contributors as each grain of pollen makes one seed.

Edited September 2, 2007 by trucha

[tizocAu]

Sorry im new here. Were can I I id a plant I that looks like the one your talking about. Mine has deep v I an sporatic short I and long spines.

[mutant]

anyone that feels Yowie looks a bit like this plant 'huancabamba' ?

[tizocAu]

Heres a few plants I suspect to be hucabamba

[slice]

the Huancabambas Im growing have more sopines (Mesa Garden´s).

[slice]

anyone that feels Yowie looks a bit like this plant 'huancabamba' ?

thought Yowie was more of a 339...

[mutant]

Yowie is definately fatter in my opinion and with longer characteristic spines. I easily distinguish between my kk339 clones, the NZ pachanoi and the NZ Yowie (probably the same as oz Yowie) without tags.

[M S Smith]

Here's another shot of plant #3 in post #16 (http://www.shaman-australis.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=15756&p=154453) just to point out again that the Huancabamba might not be as consistent in morphology as as some believe.

~Michael~

[mutant]

Hey wouldn't it be great if some time we tried to speak of

T. CF peruvianus var/forma Huancabamba

or T. pachanoi forma Yowie (OZ/NZ)

or

we started caring seriously about taxonomy and hybridisation potantial , which already has skewed opinions about species ?

It seems few of us we really know whats going on are sdtill interested in the ID/taxonomy thing

but shouldnt we be more scientific ? shouldnt we reach our own consensus??

We should do a Trichocereus convention thread to decide about this or something!!

Some would argue this should be done in nook. No, it should be done here.

after we reached a consensus

we could more easily speak of different clones.

Naming should be something that helps us, so lets turn this into a real possibility, not just endless hypothesis and a loop or people obessing about IDing shit.

After Trouts opinion, and most peoples opinion in the community is proved with DNA research from scientific papers , f.e. that Trichocereus is different genus than Echinopsis and was wrongly merged with it

we should obtain a self-esteem.

The Community know much more about Trichocerei that the experts, sometimes.

So, in this point cacti scientists that ignore the community opinion and experty in regards with phenotypes and all, should be regarded as ignorant, of the phenotypical dimention of trichocereus ID problems or the real experience about trichos.

cheers

[trucha]

A problem with trying to be scientific is that old adage GIGO.

Michael pointed out something that is really important -- that being variable morphology.

"peruvianus Huancabamba" is a pachanoi of a not uncommon sort in Peru.

What is in horticulture arose from a SINGLE seed collection which has produced both really short spined plants and more spiny plants. Some people I've encountered insist that one therefore must be wrongly labeled but I'd suggest reality is more complex and this is not uncommon - especially in this case for what is likely to be an open pollinated seedlot.

It would be great to take a scientific approach but to be successful actual definitions people agree on are needed as starting points.

The first one we need is an agreed upon definition of "species". David Cameron is the only person I've heard yet with a sane and sound definition but his is a personal definition that has never been committed to print.

After a definition of the word species, maybe the species can be defined and delineated. It feels like a 'maybe' though without some sort of convention involving everyone with an opinion.

Then perhaps the forms within the species can be successfully delineated and defined which would bring us towards the level where many discussions are now occurring.

I'm not real hopeful though due to morphologies that often exist in ranges which are not entirely dependent on variable growth conditions. It is certainly possible but requires some level of rigor in order to become meaningful. A LOT of field work needs to be done.

Another important definition that would benefit from a shared definition is "clone".

One problematic trend I've been noticing is a number of people are trying to identify what they are growing as clones that someone else has pictured someplace. It might be better to understand that clones arise from populations as individuals but all of the other individuals within the very same populations are not clones even if they look identical.

If a plant is propagated as a cutting from a clone or lineage of that clone then they are that clone. If not they are not.

The Huncabamba helps illustrate how troublesome lack of good information of a particular plant can be. Most Huancamabas I've seen were seedlings and not clones. Each one of those seedlings generates a clone line as we share its cuttings with each other.

I recently came across some interesting pachanoi clones that were field collected in Ecuador in the 1990s. I'll get some images posted as they may have some pertinence.

[mutant]

Maybe I overstated the scientific thing. Plus we dont need to be so 'Libra' about it.

you say we have to study plants in the wild. There's no reason to believe the wild plants are not themselves hybrids. So what if we know the location. Wouldn't a F1 hybrid produce a varied offspring (like in open pollinated fruit) ?? Some are actively creating new hybrids too, vendors and community persons along. We already know that species merge into another and that by creating more hybrids this will be more intense in the future.

What we need is definitions (hey we already got them) or/and

simply the will to use what we know instead of letting all those we're discussing here, confusing more people.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I am tired about stupid names and all without saying hey this is a peruvianoid or a pachanoid. I am so much better (in taxonomy) than this.

So fuck Huancambca , lets talk about T. peruvianoid/pachanoid huancamba. What is it? We could also form phenotypiucal names of non-true species which are intermediates of the two phenotypes pachanoi / peruvianus, like "pachanoperuvianoid" . I only got one such specimen my self, no wait I also got an ss hybrid that I have know idea what it is , or what to name it.

So people wont think there a species named Huancamba and we will also have the taxonomical accuracy suited to people obsessed w/ Trichos, but it doesn't look like an OCD, only a simple obsession.

using the ending -oid we are beiong descriptive, but not unscientific.

cheers

PS: not suggesting to abandon tags, heck, just being able to collect more than a bunch of tags.

Edited July 3, 2013 by mutant

[trucha]

Hybridization is one of the important elements driving speciation. Ignoring that means tossing the baby out with the bathwater. We only get to see the snapshot that exists in our time of observation and lives.

Its certainly possible and valid to categorize plants based on what is in cultivation so long as its clear that is what is ongoing and its not being used as a basis for taxonomic organizations. Taxonomy is required to focus on wild populations or plants with links to wild populations. Not by me but by taxonomists. Some take it farther. I have been told by more than one taxonomist that all wild hybrids need to be ignored. (Which is why I really appreciate David Cameron's view of speciation and hope someday he will put it into print.)

Horticulturalists commonly have their own namings and rankings for what they produce. Some areas are huge like around the epiphytes or the insane wealth of Echinopsis hybrids. Its all completely valid so long as it is not extrapolated outside its sphere.

-oids mean almost nothing taxonomically. Its just a vague categorization that frankly is the best we can do sometimes if we want to stay honest about what we know and don't know. Being honest about what we don't know is often more useful than anything else.

Lacking definitions people agree on, its unlikely the picture is somehow going to gain more meaning. Its the same story with the present set of descriptions which are overall inadequate and almost meaningless.

One thing that some people might miss is that peruvianus and pachanoi have been both merged and taken apart without regard for good work in the process.

When the seeds for Mesa Garden's "peruvianus Huancabamba" were collected (in the late 1960s) the ongoing move among most field workers was to stuff all peruvianus into pachanoi. (Cactus seeds commonly stay on vendor's lists for decades as they commonly retain viability for some decades. Horst Kunzler told me that at least one of Knize's current seed offerings were collected when he visited Horst & Margret in NM back in the mid 1960s.)

However SOME growers felt peruvianus was the parent of pachanoi and the latter just a spineless selection so used peruvianus as the name for pachanoi rather than vice versa creating several appearances of pachanoi under the name peruvianus. One can still find the pc in mass propagation in the Vista area under the name Echinopsis peruviana. Those same large growers insist all of what most on this forum would consider peruvianus are really macrogonus.

I've seen the Huancabamba flower and have no problem believing it is just a not uncommon sort of Peruvian pachanoi.

I don't care much what people call them but I do tend to preserve trade names and designations as they help tracking and locating sources.

Its all darn capricious though. For instance in and around Huancabamba there are multiple pachanoi forms growing. Had another been chosen it would no doubt be called Huancabamba by its collector. Many collectors hate taxonomy.

Something worth keeping in mind is that taxonomy is in reality more of a political process than a real science. This is true whether based on morphology or molecular data. Taxonomy is not actually about the plants but rather is entirely about how we want to categorize and classify those plants. It might seem like a subtle distinction but its actually rather useful if understood.

Despite the problems with the name macrogonus I largely like Albesiano & Kiesling's recent revision:

Echinopsis pachanoi = Trichocereus macrogonus subsp. pachanoi

Echinopsis peruviana = Trichocereus macrogonus subsp. macrogonus

Echinopsis macrogona = Trichocereus macrogonus subsp. macrogonus

The one thing I think would be a good modification would be to retain peruvianus such as occurs in the canyon of the Rio Rimac as a variety of macrogonus.

Edited July 3, 2013 by trucha

[trucha]

Also Mutant is right about the immense value of a conference on trichocereus of interest.

Mainstream science is not going to do it but a lot of people in or with one foot in mainstream science would be interested in it I suspect. It would be interesting at any rate.

Something along the lines of an EntheoGenesisAustralis but focused on cactus would be really nice.

Edited July 4, 2013 by trucha

[mutant]

Thanks for the valuable info!

Ok I will try to sum up my points one-per-one this time

1. Real science , real taxonomy doesn not help. Or even care for no cause of the community. Even if we had DNA tests for all clones, and knew the heritage, it wouldn't be much helpful, as it wouldnt really help with distinguishing clones and phenotypes with the eye. But we might know which preceeded which, and if they're scientifically the same species and what not. Genetic trees are always interesting.

I would just hope the [Albesiano_Terrazas_2012_Haseltonia_17_3-23] cladistic analysis on genus Trichocereus included more species.

2. I could accept the pachanoi = peruvianus thing, but how could you explain so big difference in growth rate between pachanois and pervuvianus?

3. I think the community does agree in some things. F.e. haven't you, Smith and Gunter (3 very experience people on the subject) some basic things you all agree upon? I mean I find the pachanoi/peruvianus/macrogonus distinction valid, and then its only a case f.e. how we name the macrogonus

T.pachanoi var. macrogonus

T. macrogonus var macrogonus

or T. peruvianus var. macrogonus

but in the end of the day we're talking more or less on the same thing, a phenotype observed to exist both in the wild and in cultivation.

4. You say -oids say nothing for science or real taxonomy, but you know what

that's what I meant lets not be so 'libra' - screw real taxonomy on the Trichocereus subject, we know better and we know it cant help much.

but -oids are much more accurate description, if you take taxonomy as a helping hand to distinguish different phenotypes.

- oids are especially helpful if you have no tag of any kind

5. I was always into skipping the experts need by becoming experts of our own needs, and clearly I inherited this from the Do It Yourself / Autonomous movement , squats, self-published music, art, fanzines and the like I was involved earlier in my life. With the wealth of information available nowadays , we are really capable of proceeding with such possibilities and potentials.

My point is, if you got not label you can ask someones opinion on whether its pachanoid or peruvianoid

Like saying "cf. pachanoi " - then you got a loose label, that's all

6. Being a Trichocereus collector, I am facing this problem and I know many of you if not all are facing it. how do you record the history of your cacti, especially if you got many, how do you keep up with multiple tags (which might fade from sun leaving you with a ... blank tag) , especially when proagating a lot.

Also, problems occur if two supposedly identical or very similar clones come with different names. Do you keep them or merge them?

If someone needs to be very thorough, he understands that mistakes in names and location info spread like disease. We got no guarantee or validation method of these names accuracy, unless we do have some phenotypical info + facts we can veryfy with our own eyes.

Like, (f.e.) Hmmm, This spination of this ozzie bridgesii clone "TIG" spination is pretty characteristic . Gunter has said PsychoO is similar too. SO in my mind and notes on the plant, I distiunguish the clone compared to other bridgesiis, so the name is good to keep, but also, "TIG" could be a double name or psychO.

So, maybe its worth to try and keep right track of the most characteristic and unique clones, clones we regard important for own reasons, but I think it would be difficult for most of us to keep track and remember everything...

therefore a common consensus on what we call these damn cacti would be neat!

7. Maybe taxonomic confusion is after all, good for the communities causes. And of course, the community will always be a good source of interesting info on the subject and of course interesting clones .

[trucha]

One problem with naming is there are two approaches.

One is to take the path of horticulture. This has a lot of flexibility.

The other is to take the path of taxonomy. It has formal rules of naming which requires macrogonus being the primary name unless we abandon macrogonus. The rules are less scientific in intent than they are conventions to aid uniformity in expression.

Taxonomy actually can fill in the gaps it just requires someone to do the work. That is the tripping point.

For instance in Albesiano & Kiesling it certainly WOULD be great if it included more plants. However, who PAYS for that work?

Its not a subtle point that science is costly especially when trying to get time on a sequencer.

And its not just about money but about time since most of the work in this area takes a significant amount of time.

I run into this with publishing also, a lot of people just don't grasp what is involved in the real world. One person on this forum, when griping about it being in b&w, actually made a comment about San Pedro book that they would have been willing to pay a bit more for color as if the 450% production cost increase would enable printing it in color to cost only a bit more rather than 4.5X the price (which of course would work for no one).

Analysis of any type adds up fast. Even just getting a simple gc-ms done commercially is running $200 a sample right now. If there is no profit being made from the work it means someone has to be paying for it out of their own pocket. And in this particular area a huge amount of the work gets done that way.

SOMETIMES there are people who volunteer work. Much of what has occurred relied on that in fact. Its a limited amount of people, each of which offers a limited amount of free work. Quite understandably and I am quite thankful for any piece of it as the vast majority of people who offer help with such things never follow through.

I think me and Michael have probably grown apart in a number of areas as I find there to be steadily less certainty about many names and recognitions of species as I see more of single lineages growing in different environments or countries and get a chance to revisit single plants over years of time.

I'm also not convinced that there is any point trying to have detailed discussions about taxonomy with anyone prior to establishing a shared vocabulary of definitions. I've largely given up discussions about taxonomy with anyone other than botanists for that reason. Even then the conversations start with establishing shared definitions or we don't talk about those particular elements.

When you refer to pachanoi and peruvianus which pachanoi are you referring to?

I've seen very rapidly growing really fat peruvianus and very slow growing pachanoi as well as seeing just the opposite for both depending on their conditions of growth.

The fattest and fastest growing peruvianus I've seen interestingly have all been in moderately high degrees of shade. I saw one of those Matucana peruvianus grow almost a meter of 16+ cm diameter growth in a single year IN A POT on a shady deck in the North Bay.

My point though might be more subtle. If based on flowers pachanoi and peruvianus are either one species or else what we presently recognize as pachanoi is more than one species. Both elements can't be simultaneously true.

Macrogonus and peruvianus seem to intergrade or else be peaks in a spectrum.

At present its a pretty capricious decision whether one wants to think of the three as species or subspecies since a decent description exists for none of them.

Hybrids in the wild don't tend to exist as simple groupings of F1s unless we are somehow lucky enough to be visiting only the first generation of F1 seedlings occurring with a total crop failure of the nonhybridized fruit. Its more typical for hybrid swarming or grex-type outcomes to develop.

At the same time its incredibly valuable to keep track of those forms and clones that we VALUE. It really has nothing to do with taxonomy and is about being able to know that what we grow is what we want to be growing.

Edited July 9, 2013 by trucha

[CβL]

The biggest thing we can do now, is to preserve exactly existing data, and not corrupt it further. It's emphatically useless to give a South American location name to a plant you got from the garden centre. Record which garden centre it came from, but don't trade it saying that you IDed it as 'Rimac' from how it looks. There's no shame in not knowing the exact ancestral history of a clone - in fact it's preferable than a false one.

Here's my approach to taxonomy:
If any of you guys know anything about maths, you'll know that if you have a N dimensions of Reals, then there are spanning vectors that can span the entire space. For example, if you have 2d space, the vectors x:= (1,0) & y:= (0,1) in any linear combination are enough to span the space. This is a cartesian grid. A linear combination that spans the space means you if you have a*x + b*y, then there exists a choice of a and b that add up to any point on the cartesian grid. So you can pick a point, and there exists a single combination of a and b that specify that point.
The vectors x₁:= (1,0) x₂:= (2,0) are not enough to space 2d space. In linear combination, they can make any point on a vertical line from the origin, but nothing else. They are not a spanning set of vectors (of 2d space).



What on Earth does this have to do with cacti? -Just hold up a bit more.

So there's another way (among infinity more) to map 2d space. It's called an isometric grid:


Here, there are three vectors. They are (the names don't matter): y:= (0,1) - the lines going straight up, u:= (-cos(30),sin(30)) - the lines going to the top left, and v:= (cos(30),sin(30)) - the lines going to the top right.
If the numbers don't mean anything then don't worry. Just look at the picture.
Now the entire point of this excursion into maths is to notice that if you pick any point on this grid, there's multiple ways to get there. If you just pick the point straight above the one you start at, there's two unique ways to get there (if you allow for combinations of each of the vector y's to sum up to one y, u's to sum up to one u and v to sum up to one v) which are:
1) Take a vector y (go straight up one)
2) Take a vector u and v (go left-up and right up [in any order])

So the key thing to notice from this isometric grid, is there is not just a single way to get to a certain point. What we've actually found out, is that there are redundant vectors. The vector y can be made by any combination of u and v. We can remove it, and still get to any point on the grid with just u and v.

What about the cacti? -Almost there

So the space we are interested in, is the space of all possible Trichocereus. The spanning vectors we have chosen are the species of Trichocereus (Peruvianus, Pachanoi, Bridgesii, Scopulicola, Terscheckii, etc). So what originally was thought, is that we thought we had a cartesian grid (in a higher dimension) and the species were basis vectors - this implied than any particular Trichocereus hybrid could be made by only one single combination of parents.
But, as we are beginning to find out, the "Trichocereus space" is not quite like this, the peruvianus and pachanoi are a lot more similar to eachother than first thought (this implies they're almost parallel lines in some dimensioned space). This further implies that a particular hybrid could theoretically be made by many different combinations of the original species identified. So what does this mean? It means that it is still possible to cover the entire space (= make any hybrid) using the original species (if they were indeed a spanning set), it's just there are more than one ways to get there (= make a hybrid). If there are multiple ways of getting somewhere, it's better to choose one, rather than to give up entirely.

So what I'm sort of alluding to, is that we can understand hybrids in terms of the archetypal species we have identified even if they are not perfect (i.e. the set of species is redundant, that even if peruvianus and scop could make a bridgesii (a la the vectors u and v make y, making y redundant)) we can still use them to understand the hybrids in terms of them.

[trucha]

I like hybrids as they can shed a lot of light about their parents.

Its a great idea to maintain indication of the sources along with the name even though my attempt to do that in San Pedro probably caused more misunderstandings than anything else in that book due to some people apparently not reading the intro and thinking the source (variably a company, person or country) which followed the name and was set apart in parenthesis were being proposed as their actual names.

My favorite was someone voicing some complaint about Oz's plants thinking Oz was a person rather than being a note that the plant was located in Australia.

I'd suggest another other valuable thing is not to get hung up on names, lack of names or trying to force fit a name on something based on simple morphology. "I don't know" is often the most honest thing anyone can say.

That is OK.

Being honest about what we don't know and constantly looking for places we can prove that we are in error is something the best we can all do. If data can be amassed without being obsessed about making it all make sense during the process of accumulation (which only adds to the confusion), eventually enough will accumulate that it will start to form good patterns. I'd anticipate them to overlap and not have clean transitions since a lot of morphological features exist in ranges that overlap between what we now recognize as species. Understanding this is probably just as important as understanding the ways they differ.

It would be worth working out any bugs for those cool diagnosis graphs using some known F1 hybrids.

A small set exists for pachanotXJuuls and for pachanotXperuvianus and for peruvianusXJuuls.

Studying those three sets of known hybrids is what led me to conclude the pachanot (or, if you prefer, the PC) is most likely a hybrid and also to suspect bridgesii as one of the parents.

[CβL]

I've noticed something similar with my SS02 x Bridgesii seedlings. The few I have seem to be bimodally distributed. The first is basically just what appears to be a normal bridgesii, albeit with impressive spines. The second is almost like a Pachanoi/Peruvianus - very small spines, usually not as blue, and with somewhat of a sinuous rib margin. I don't have a big sample size, so I'd be interested to see more plants. I should take photos. I wish I was more organized. :S

[Getafix]

I've noticed something similar with my SS02 x Bridgesii seedlings. The few I have seem to be bimodally distributed. The first is basically just what appears to be a normal bridgesii, albeit with impressive spines. The second is almost like a Pachanoi/Peruvianus - very small spines, usually not as blue, and with somewhat of a sinuous rib margin. I don't have a big sample size, so I'd be interested to see more plants. I should take photos. I wish I was more organized. :S

I agree 100%

I will load some pics tomorrow of SS02 x Bridgesii as mine show the same above characteristics