Hypnodendron dendroides (Brid.) Touw

  • Authority

    Buck, William R. 1987. Bryostephane Steereana: A Collection of Bryological Papers Presented to William Campbell Steere On The Occasion of His 80th Birthday. Mem. New York Bot. Gard. 45: 1-749.

  • Family

    Hypnodendraceae

  • Scientific Name

    Hypnodendron dendroides (Brid.) Touw

  • Discussion

    n = 4, 2n = 8. Figs. 34-44, 61e, f

    A common species in N e w Guinea, H. dendroides, in section Comosa is an extremely common and variable species in which Touw (1971) has noted eight entities that can be divided into two groups: 'dendroides' and 'aristinerve'. The entities and groups were not considered worthy of formal names as intermediates were common, The variability and difficulty in defining this taxon are illustrated by the large number of synonyms. Ramsay (1983a) recorded the chromosome number as n = 4 at meiosis, confirmed at premeiotic mitosis as 2n = 8 for a single collection from Papua New Guinea. The further seven populations examined in the present investigations (Table I, Appendix I), all had the same chromosome number, n = 4 (Figs. 34-44). The haploid mitotic complement consisted of one large metacentric, two medium sized metacentrics and a small submetacentric (fig. 3 in Ramsay, 1983a, is aligned here as Fig. 42). The four large bivalents (Fig. 61e, f) in each of six additional populations were similar in size to those previously studied. A representative set of bivalents from the two populations are aligned as Figs. 39-41 The number was confirmed at metaphase I (Figs 4-36) and anaphase I of meiosis (Fig. 37) and t anaphase II (Fig. 38).