From Plant Press, Vol. 4, No. 3 from July 2001.
By Robert DeFilipps
Ferns and their entourage of “allies” have been on the earth for ages. Related by similarities of their structure and life history as spore-bearing vascular cryptogams, the ancestors of today’s ferns, horsetails (Equisetum), club-mosses (Lycopodium), and spike-mosses (Selaginella) once freely cohabited in communities exemplified by now-extinct ferns (such as Psaronius), horsetails (Annularia, Sphenophyllum), and giant club-mosses (Lepidodendron) in the swamp forests of the Carboniferous Age, approximately 300 million years ago. On display in the National Museum of Natural History are fossil impressions of their leaves and stems, preserved in rounded structures known to paleobotanists as “coal balls,” while untold millions of tons of their pressurized remains are burned as coal.
Segments of those plant lineages that evolved and survived through the geological ages, and have come down to us as the living ferns and fern-allies of the New World tropics, are the major research interest of David B. Lellinger, curator of pteridophytes in Botany. Under Lellinger’s meticulous supervision at the U.S. National Herbarium is the largest and most diverse fern collection in the Western Hemisphere, in excess of 250,000 specimens, including six full-size cases of precious type material. His predecessors in a century of continuous fern curation were William R. Maxon who started in 1899, followed by Conrad V. Morton who was employed at the Smithsonian from 1926 to1972. Lellinger, who started as a herbarium aide in 1960, has been a full curator since 1987. Morton and Lellinger were co-authoring South American fern articles as early as 1966.
Lellinger was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1937, and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana (A.B. with Highest Distinction in Botany, 1958) before proceeding to graduate studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (M.S. 1960; Ph.D. 1965). His botanical beginning was inspired by a chance meeting with Albert Fuller (Milwaukee Public Museum), eventually resulting in an undergraduate thesis on the flora of what is now called Tofts Point Natural Area, Wisconsin, after which G. Neville Jones at Urbana pointed Lellinger in the direction of Michigan’s Herb Wagner, who became his major professor.
The structures of ferns require a unique descriptive terminology, the use of which is strongly championed by Lellinger, since the fern “frond,” which unrolls from a “crozier” or “fiddlehead,” is morphogenetically different in its mode of development from marginal meristems, from that of the angiosperm “leaf.” Often delicately compound into divisions known as “pinnae,” “pinnules,” and “pinnulets,” the frond has a “stipe” corresponding to a “petiole,” while spore-cases known as “sori” are formed on the underside or on separate fertile fronds.
The special terminology and concepts relating to ferns have recently been clarified by Lellinger in a major work entitled A Modern Multilingual Glossary for Taxonomic Pteridology which covers approximately 1,100 terms and synonyms in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. It will be published this year by the American Fern Society in Pteridologia, a leading journal of which Lellinger is currently editor and business manager.
One of Lellinger’s abiding interests has been the pteridophyte flora of the region comprising Costa Rica, Panama, and the Chocó in Colombia, where he conducted fieldwork in various years from 1967 to 1987. In southeastern Panama-northwestern Colombia this area embraces the notorious Darién Gap, a nearly roadless isthmian configuration of mountains and swamps. The Panamanian portion is home to the Emberá, Wounaan, and Kuna Indians, and the vantage point from which the Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa was, in 1513, the first European to see the Pacific Ocean.
In Part 1 (Pteridologia 2A. 1989) of his account, Lellinger reported 562 species of ferns and fern-allies from the area of Costa Rica through the Chocó. His fern collections furnished material for many taxonomic studies by various investigators, while examination of gatherings of other plant groups resulted in three new species of Colombian angiosperms named for him: Guzmania lellingeri L.B. Smith & R.W. Read (Bromeliaceae); Fleischmannia lellingeri King & Robinson and Hebeclinium lellingeri King & Robinson, both Asteraceae. He is presently finishing Part 2 of the overall publication, while simultaneously coordinating the preparation of a Warren H. Wagner memorial issue of the American Fern Journal.
Occasionally a scientist will be accorded the pleasure of being the namesake of a small new genus, but few have been the recipient of a large one. The grammitid fern genus Lellingeria A.R. Smith & R.C. Moran came into being when three genera or “grades” were fractionated into seven or eight genera, and Lellingeria was created to contain approximately 60 species occurring in tropical America, Africa, Madagascar, and Hawaii.
In the past few centuries, different groups of desirable plants were subjected to surges of acquisition by obsessed but often well-intentioned fanciers, gardeners, and speculators in various parts of the world. Perhaps the most recent example was the “Cactus Craze” involving endangered species, but the most famous were “Tulipomania” and “Orchidomania.” Our diminutive friends the ferns, however, did not escape such attention during the period from 1830 to 1860 in Victorian England, when the verdant countryside was scoured for cristates and other mutants destined for incarceration in Wardian cases, a pastime soon to become known as the “Victorian Fern Craze,” or “Pteridomania.” The rise and fall of that movement has recently been elaborated by Robbin Moran (Fiddlehead Forum 28(2): 11-14. 2001).
In today’s world, fern collections are still yielding many interesting novelties, but in a spirit of vastly more controlled levels of collecting and a high regard for the conservation of remaining plant populations of the tropics. Recent work is exemplified by, among many others, Gregory S. McKee, who has assisted Lellinger in Botany since 1998, and has with Carol L. Kelloff of the Smithsonian’s Biological Diversity of the Guianas Program, discovered a remarkable new species named Hecistopteris kaieteurensis from Kaieteur National Park in Guyana. The forked fronds of this epiphyte attain a length of only 2 cm (less than 1 inch). Other fern people, who have been long-term visitors or on fellowships recently in Lellinger’s laboratory, include Julie Barcelona of the Philippines, and the Brazilians Jefferson Prado who is working on Adiantaceae and Paulo Windisch, who is undertaking a fern flora of the sprawling state of Mato Grosso.
Lellinger’s future plans include not only preparation of the second edition of his landmark book, A Field Manual of the Ferns & Fern-Allies of the United States and Canada (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), but also a color-illustrated photographic field guide to the ferns and fern-allies of the northern Netherlands Antilles (Dutch West Indies), in collaboration with his wife.
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