Revision of Passiflora Subgenus Decaloba ... - Passion Flowers

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identical specimens with very large flowers and long androgynophores have
been collected at the type locality. Thus, I have included it as a synonym of P.
tridactylites rather than P. suberosa ssp. litoralis, which also occurs on the
Galápagos Islands.
Killip (1938) lumped P. lineariloba, P. tridactylites, and P. puberula with P.
suberosa. He found that the entities on the Galápagos Islands with very narrow
leaf lobes that had been labeled P. lineariloba matched material collected by
Safford and Mosier (227) from Florida. In addition, he noted that material similar
to P. tridactylites exactly matched specimens collected by Brown (115) in
Jamaica. Based upon vegetative characters alone he is quite correct, but the
flowers of these Galápagos specimens are distinctive. The specimens of Safford
and Mosier and Brown are examples of P. pallida, and the flowers and fruits of
that species are far smaller than those of P. tridactylites. Lawesson (1988)
differentiated between P. tridactylites and P. suberosa stating that the species
were easily separated by the shape and size of the sepals and the
androgynophore length.
Passiflora tridactylites may be confused with P. suberosa ssp. litoralis, which
also occurs in the Galápagos Islands. Both species exhibit a great amount of
variation in their vegetative morphology, with both species possessing all of the
different vegetative forms described by Hooker, and I have not been able to find
any vegetative characters that can reliably be used to distinguish between them.
However, the flowers and fruits of these two species are quite different. The
sepals of P. tridactylites are commonly 10-14 mm long, whereas those of P.