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Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Dipterocarp walk at MacRitchie Part 2

In this 2nd post of last Sunday’s walk, let me just recap back to the beginning about it, since I had left that out in my 1st post.

Organised by the Plant Group of NSS, I joined this walk in keen anticipation to learn more plants. Primary forest flora are definitely not my forte, so its great that this walk came along.

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The crowd was much more than what I expected, but then this was the 1st plant walk I attended.

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And I guess it is also because of Dr Shawn Lum’s undeniable charm.

After a brief introduction about some of the dipterocarp genera that we can see today, we headed into Lornie Trail.

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The first species we saw was this Anisoptera megistocarpa. He mentioned that the secondary veins of this genus are looped at the margins, evident from the picture below.

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Just for interest, the common name of this species is Mersawa merah.

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The second dip we were introduced to was the Keruing gombang merah, or Dipterocarpus kunstleri. This genus have leaves that are wavy are the margins and bears some resemblance to a piece of corrugated cardboard.

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He told us the sad story of an adult Dipterocarpus kunstleri which died. However, its presence is still marked its many small baby trees like the two above.

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I had heard about the big stipules of Dips but I never knew they were this large! I believed that this one belonged to Dipterocarpus kunstleri. We can see them scattered throughout the forest floor around the tree.

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Shorea species have a twisted petiole compared to the other dips. The one above shows Shorea ovalis, a member of the Red Meranti group. It is rough on the underside.

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Managed to take a picture of the tree.

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And branches.

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This leaf belonged to Shorea macroptera, the underside of this is smooth and seems to have a distinct in-rolling along the margins.

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This is Shorea pauciflora. Note the twisted petiole in all the 3 Shorea species.

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The large trunk of Shorea pauciflora marks the end of our walk. I had missed out three species as I had no good photos of. Will do that another time when I come here another day.

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It was really a nice morning walk with new knowledge gained. Luckily I was not that lazy that day to wake up early!

I have blogged about most of the species learnt during this walk in the total vascular of Singapore online, so that you may have a quick and easy search in case anyone need to refer. :)

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