Cactus Explorers Journal - The Cactus Explorers Club

The Cactus Explorer ISSN 2048-0482 Number 4 May 2012
doEs MaMMIllarIa yuCatanEnsIs
stIll ExIst In yuCatán?
We usually hear from explorers who manage to find what they are looking for.
Readers might get the impression that finding plants in nature is easy. Here, Rene
Samek explains that persistent searching did not enable him to find his quarry.
Photographs by the author.
Fig.1 Terrain at Laguna Rosada
Nearly ten years ago I made a trip to the
Yucatán penninsula, primarily to see Maya
pyramids and other sights, but determined to
look for cacti along the way. As I was travelling
with two non-cactophiles, opportunities for
thorough searches further from the roads were
limited, but we had a rental car so we could
make a stop whenever the terrain seemed
suitable for cacti. We travelled almost the
whole length and width of the peninsula, from
the lowlands of Tabasco north to Merida, due
east to Cancun. From there, we went South to
Tulum and more-or-less retraced our steps
back to Chiapas, making various stops and
detours on both ways at places such as
Campeche, Uxmal, Merida, Valladolid and
Chichen Itza.
One of the cacti I wanted to see in its natural
habitat was Mammillaria yucatanensis. It is
relatively common in cultivation, both in the
Czech Republic and in the UK, but it seems
that it has not been collected in Yucatán during
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recent decades, since all the field numbers of
M. yucatanensis (also listed as M. columbiana
var. yucatanensis or M. chiapensis) are from
Chiapas, either from El Aguacero/Cascada de
Aguacero (L 1507, FO 304, ML 373), the nearby
Ocozocuautla (Rep 960), or without precise
data (FO 325 - Chiapas).
It seems that even the great Austrian
mammillariophile Werner Reppenhagen, who
travelled the length and breadth of Mexico
during his 26 expeditions to the country
between 1959 and 1989, did not find M.
yucatanensis in Yucatán. We know that he did
visit the state - his four field numbers of
Mammillaria gaumeri are a proof of that. He
even took the effort to travel to Haiti to see
such an ordinary plant as Mammillaria prolifera
in its habitat (as well as to Venezuela, Curacao
and the Virgin Islands to collect a single
species of Mammillaria in each of these
countries).