Spiranthes cernua, jersey coast

[cmu]

This last fall I was visiting a wildlife preserve on the jersey coast, and found some excellent native orchids in flower! Spiranthes cernua. They may have formerly been identified as Spiranthes odorata or cernua var odorata but examination has shown them to be cernua

Not sure why the image is sideways, don’t see option to rotate it

[Roberta]

Nice!

As far as the photo rotation is concerned it is a bug (feature?) of the software. If you download the photo to computer, open it with a photo editor, rotate and save, rotate back and save, it will stay correctly oriented. (That seems to reset the metadata that tells the site what to do with it)

[neophyte]

What an exciting find! I'll beat Afid to the shameless plug...

Originally Posted by Afid

You should post these (and any others you find) on iNaturalist (a citizen science/nature observation website). We have a fairly active orchid community there and would love to see and ID your finds! Plus it would contribute to the growing repository of orchid data on the site as well!

[Afid]

Originally Posted by neophyte

What an exciting find! I'll beat Afid to the shameless plug...

Looks like I was just a little bit too slow, but yes, iNaturalist is great!

[cmu]

Thanks for the invite! I am actually on inat as cnycharles (I think) but hadn’t made any location uploads yet. This site was shared with me by someone with a very large database of locations, and it may already be listed somewhere. I’d have to check with them first before recording locations. If you’d like to see lots of my pictures I have them on slippertalk and my Insta cnycharles

[isurus79]

Seems pretty late in the year for cernua. Could it be one of the others?

[cmu]

This photo was taken October 18th. I had originally been there a few weeks earlier but the largest plants were only just starting to flower. I posted the pic after I realized I’d never posted any native orchid pics and thought I’d reintroduce myself
I’ve heard of a Spiranthes praecox, and it’s listed sometimes for New Jersey, but I’ve never seen it. These and many delaware/pa plants formerly called odorata had been tested and though they are very robust, they are not supposed to be Spiranthes odorata which I’m told is diploid only. These are supposed to be polyploid which Cernuas are, so eliminated from possibly being odorata
Spiranthes are kind of a taxonomic id mess though they are pretty

[isurus79]

Originally Posted by cmu

This photo was taken October 18th. I had originally been there a few weeks earlier but the largest plants were only just starting to flower. I posted the pic after I realized I’d never posted any native orchid pics and thought I’d reintroduce myself
I’ve heard of a Spiranthes praecox, and it’s listed sometimes for New Jersey, but I’ve never seen it. These and many delaware/pa plants formerly called odorata had been tested and though they are very robust, they are not supposed to be Spiranthes odorata which I’m told is diploid only. These are supposed to be polyploid which Cernuas are, so eliminated from possibly being odorata
Spiranthes are kind of a taxonomic id mess though they are pretty

Ah, very cool!

I agree they're a taxonomic mess. We have one here in Texas that is federally protected (S. parksii), but several genetic analyses indicate its simply a peloric version of S. cernua.

[cmu]

Ah; Cernua confuses again! In central ny where I grew up and worked recently, I was trying to get true pictures of all the native orchids found in New York fir an educational display. Had the hardest time finding real Spiranthes ochroleuca. I’d send flowers or pictures to chuck sheviak, and he’d write back, ‘no, another form of cernua’ (sigh, eyes rolling). There are tons of Spiranthes in nys and now true cernua May not even be present there. Lots of lookalikes and such

[neophyte]

From what I've read/seen, Spiranthes praecox has a white labellum with thin green lines extending outwards, kind of like a firework, and its flowers are sort of more tubular/linear; Spiranthes odorata has a faint to strong yellow-green wash on its lip – if that helps. The Spiranthes cernua complex (which does not include the above species) has recently gone under some major revision, making identification even more difficult than it already is, and a lot of the cryptic species have enormous variation/overlaps in morphology and can really only be reliably identified through DNA sequencing. Still, I'm sure it's fun to find and (try to) identify them!

Here's a link to the recently published (long/convoluted) paper: paper.