The rarest flower

The genus of plants called Ceropegia are pollinated in a very strange way, The Family explained to me. After her first trip to Kaas plateau two years ago, she showed me photos of this strange flower and explained how they trap flies to pollinate themselves. The upright flower opens up and flies come in to look for nectar. As soon as they land, the petals close into the cage shape you see in the featured photo. The frantic fly buzzes about and pollinates the flower. After this the flower droops down and opens up to let the insect out. In the bunch of Ceropegia vincaefolia that you see in the featured photo, two of the flowers are ready, and the droopy one has been pollinated already. These tall bushes were fairly common around the Kaas lake. Apart from the mode of pollination, I found the green colour of the petals rather unusual.

But the most marvelous sight of the trip was this tiny plant on the plateau: Ceropegia jainii. I was lucky to be with two naturalists who knew roughly where to look. This species is a little rarer than tigers. In the photo you see the green egg-shaped base called the crown kettle, and the purple crown tube formed by the five petals. If you look closely, you will see the downward pointing hairs inside the tube which trap the fly. If this flower is similar to that of the C. vincaefolia, then at the narrow bottom of the crown kettle is the hard-to-reach corolla. I was not going to dissect such a rare flower to look inside it. The whole flower is a little less than two centimeters long. You can see that it grows on an unbranched stalk with thick leaves. In the photo above you can see other buds forming on the stalk.

I was so thrilled with the sight that I noticed the caterpillar only after looking at the photo. It will eventually grow into the spectacularly coloured butterfly called the plain tiger (Danaus chrysippus). I don’t know whether there is an association between this and C. jainii. Since host plants of the plain tiger include other known milkweeds (family Asclepiadoideae) it is not impossible. On the other hand, I did not see the typical circular holes that the caterpillar makes in the leaves of its host plant. In any case, this is something to watch for in future.