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190 126). Part of the expedition were also the biologists E. Reimoser and C. Fr. Roewer. Dr. Otto Porsch (1875-1959) (Fig. 55B), who in 1921 had succeeded Karl Wilhelm as director of the botanical garden of the University of Natural Resources at Vienna, was responsible for the botanical collections and director of the expedition (Díaz Bolaños, 2007: 7). His main collaborator was the botanist Giorgio Cufodontis (1896-1974) (Fig. 55C) (Grayum et al., 2004: 20). An expert in flower pollination, Porsch had traveled to Brazil in the first years of the XX century and collected many new types of Orchidaceae, such as Meiracyllium wetsteinii Porsch, Physurus austrobrasiliensis Porsch, Masdevallia zebrina Porsch, Physurus kuczynskii Porsch, Campylocentrum chlororhizum Porsch, Catasetum fimbriatum Rchb.f. var. aurantiacum Porsch, Catasetum ornithorrhynchum Porsch, Cranichis microphylla Porsch, Habenaria paulensis Porsch, Habenaria wacketii Porsch, Pleurothallis bupleurifolia Porsch, Pleurothallis laxiflora Porsch, Stelis guttifera Porsch and Stenorhynchus loefgrenii Porsch, all published in 1905 in the Oesterreichische Botanische Zeitschrift (=Austrian Journal of Botany). Porsch wrote: “Because of the great number of types [of hummingbirds] in small areas, Costa Rica was the richest region for a possible and multiple answers to this question [the relation between flowers and their pollinators]” (Porsch, 1931: 11). If we follow Dressler, Porsch’s writings must be taken carefully: “I think that Porsch’s paper [...] is really a classic of how to get 40 pages of publication out of one short paragraph of data” (In a letter to R.L. Rodríguez, 2 November, 1967). Porsch and Cufodontis could be proud to travel through Costa Rica in the company of the best guides they could think of: Ferdinand Nevermann was their host in his ‘Finca Hamburgo’ and their guide through the Atlantic region, Charles Lankester showed them the best of his orchid garden in Cóncavas, Alfred Brade hiked with them to the summit of the Turrialba volcano and Alberto M. Brenes traveled with them through Guanacaste and the southern Osa Peninsula. Brenes would write, two years later, an account of his journey to Guanacaste with the expedition (Brenes, 1956). Among the orchid specimens collected by the expedition and reported by Cufodontis (1933) were: Vanilla fragans (Salisb.) Ames (Cufodontis LANKESTERIANA LANKESTERIANA 9(1—2), August 2009. © Universidad de Costa Rica, 2009. 735, Hamburg Farm), Stelis thecoglossa Rchb. f. (Nevermann 496, Vulcanus Irazu), Maxillaria crassifolia (Lindl.) Rchb. f. (Brenes 162, Golfito). Lepanthes brenesii Schltr. (Lankester 802, Las Cóncavas), Brassavola nodosa Lindl. (A. Brade 799, Las Cóncavas), and Cattleya dowiana Batem. (A. Brade 818, Vulcanus Turrialba, floruit culta). Porsch and Cufodontis were also responsible for the discovery of two new species of Erythrina (Fabaceae): Erythrina globocalyx Porsch & Cufod. and Erythrina gibbosa Cufod. However, the expedition did not meet the expectations, at least from the botanical point of view. Less than 900 specimens were collected and almost nothing was published about the scientific results, in part because of the political disturbances brought by the rising Nazi movement, which led a few years later (1938) to Austria’s annexation by Germany. Expelled from the university in 1934 for his notorious right-wing inclinations, Porsch wrote in 1932 a phytogeographical description of Costa Rica (Porsch, 1932), in which he followed closely the previous work by C. Wercklé (1909). Cufodontis wrote five articles about the results of the scientific expedition, which he published in German and Italian (Díaz Bolaños, 2008). U.S. botanist Austin Smith (1881-1948) was born in Ohio and came to Costa Rica in 1920. He lived in Guanacaste until 1937 and then settled in the small town of Zarcero de Alfaro Ruiz (Grayum et al., 2004: 22). Smith made a living as a horticulturist, exporting plants and seeds to the United States, and collected, among others, Prosthechea brassavolae (Rchb. f.) W.E. Higgins (Smith 1048), Crossoglossa fratrum (Schltr.) Dressler (Smith 1055), Sobralia leucoxantha Rchb. f. (Smith 1173), Elleanthus wercklei Schltr. (Smith 1343) and Habenaria aviculoides Ames & C. Schweinf. (Smith 1376). Paullinia austin-smithii Standl. of the Sapindaceae carries his name. Smith was also interested in ornithology and wrote several articles about his observations of Costa Rican birds. The Swiss Walter Kupper (1874-1953) (Fig. 55D), was the first botanist to climb Cerro Chirripó, Costa Rica’s highest peak and collected in this country from November 1931 to July 1932, a journey sponsored by the Bavarian Academy of Science (Sussengut, 1954: 170). Kupper was Curator of the Botanical Garden in Munich, Germany, a position he held until his
ossenbaCh — Orchids and orchidology in Central America retirement in 1940. Maxillaria thienii Dodson (Kupper 374) is one of his orchid specimens and Mansfeld described a new species, Kegeliella kupperi based on one of his collections near Tilarán, in Costa Rica. In a narrative about his collecting experiences in Costa Rica, Kupper compares the size of the country (“not even as large as Bavaria”) with the number of orchid species that can be found, “larger than in any other tropical country” (Kupper, 1938: 2). During the same journey Kupper visited Christian Halbinger, in Mexico. They became close friends and Kupper sent years later his collection of Vandas to Halbinger, fearing that they could be destroyed during World War II. Fernando Solís Rojas collected some orchids between 1935 and 1949: Pleurothallis amparoana Schltr. (Solís 345), Xylobium powellii (Solís 354), and Pleurothallis dolichopus Schltr. (Solís 473). “In 1943, a visiting American team, led by C. A. Merker and including fellow forester William R. Barbour and botanists Elbert Luther Little Jr. (1907— ) and Wiliam Adams Dayton (1885-1958), surveyed Costa Rican forest resources in connection with the U.S. war effort, producing, among other things, an annotated list of important forest trees and a crude vegetation map of the country” (Grayum et al., 2004: 23). Among their orchid collections were Nidema boothii (Lindl.) Schltr. (Barbour 1037), and Arpophyllum giganteum Hartw. ex Lindl. (Barbour 1035). Richard W. Holm (1895-1987) and Hugh H. Iltis (1925-), botanized in various neglected corners of Costa Rica in 1949, including the northern plains of the Guatusos. Their painstaking collections include Corymborkys forcipigera (Rchb. f. & Warsz.) L.O. Williams (Holm & Iltis 104), Govenia Lindl. sp. (Holm & Iltis 136), Pleurothallis phyllocardioides Schltr. (Holm & Iltis 195), Elleanthus cynarocephalus (Rchb. f.) Rchb. f. (Holm & Iltis 406), and Oncidium bryolophotum Rchb. f. (Holm & Iltis 631). Although the harvest of those years was meager, not everything was lost. Alexander F. Skutch (1904-2004) (Fig. 56A), who lived in Costa Rica from 1935 until his recent death, soon became one of the country’s most respected leaders in the study of natural sciences and in the development of a new relationship between mankind and its natural environment. At the age of 16, after reading Shelley’s poetry and essays, he decided to become a 191 vegetarian. Although love and affection for animals were his initial reasons, he later found scientific arguments and often stated that one of the main causes for the destruction of tropical forests was the need to clear great extensions of land for grazing. After graduating as a Bachelor of Botany at John Hopkins University, in Baltimore (1925), he traveled in 1926 to Jamaica, to study the leaf anatomy of bananas at a plantation of the United Fruit Company (UFC), which was the base for his doctoral theses Anatomy of the Leaf of Banana, Musa sapientum L. var. Hort. Gros Michel, in 1928. The same year he received a grant to continue his research on banana in another of the UFC experiment stations near Almirante, in Panama. These were his first contacts with tropical nature. In the early 1930s he traveled to Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador, Venezuela and Costa Rica. As a result, he published many papers on tropical flora and fauna and became soon one of the world’s leading ornithologists. “In 1933-34, Alexander F. Skutch obtained a small but excellently prepared collection from several departments [of Guatemala], mainly in Huehuetenango and Quiché” (Ames & Correll, 1985: viii). Among his orchid collections from Guatemala we find Habenaria entomantha (Llave & Lex.) Lindl. (Skutch 519), Habenaria monorrhiza (Sw.) Rchb. f. (Skutch 1377), Triphora trianthophora (Sw.) Rydb. (Skutch 494), Cranichis apiculata Lindl. (Skutch 923) and a new species, Epidendrum skutchii Ames, Hubb. & C. Schweinf. (Skutch 1715). He came to Costa Rica in 1935, to the valley of El General, with contracts to collect plants for museums and botanical gardens in the United States and Europe. This income was sufficient for Skutch to continue with his scientific studies on birds. His collections of orchids from Costa Rica include Masdevallia nidifica Rchb. f. (Skutch 171), Xylobium foveatum (Lindl.) G. Nicholson (Skutch 2147), Ponthieva racemosa (Walter) C. Mohr (Skutch 2198), and again a new species, Stelis skutchii Ames (Skutch 3126). Several years later (1941) he bought a small farm on the Peñas Blancas river, that he called “Los Cusingos”, the local name for the orange beaked toucanet (Pteroglossus frantzii) where he lived for over 60 years until his death in 2004. In 1950 he married one of Charles H. Lankester’s daughters, Pamela, who died in 2001. LANKESTERIANA 9(1—2), August 2009. © Universidad de Costa Rica, 2009.
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