Biologist Dr Chris Stapleton from the United Kingdom has described two new genera of African mountain bamboos.
Oldeania alpina looks like a Phyllostachys species from China, but is very different under the ground and in its branching. It is found on mountains from Cameroon across to Ethiopia (© Chris Stapleton).
African mountain bamboos are something of a mystery, as nearly all bamboos are found in Asia or South America. Hidden away up mountains in the tropics where they provide food for gorillas, just as China’s bamboos provide food for the Giant Panda, there are apparently only two species, and they had not been examined in very great detail.
It had been thought that the African bamboos were very closely related to the hundreds of similar bamboos in Asia, but their respective ranges are separated by thousands of miles. As flowering in bamboos is such a rare event, spreading by seed takes a very long time, and the suspicion arose that they might be old enough to represent new genera, and possibly could even be remnants of the earliest temperate bamboos, which spread to Asia on drifting tectonic plates.
African bamboo Bergbambos tessellata (© Chris Stapleton).
Dr Stapleton found that the features of African mountain bamboos were significantly different to those of Asia, and together with the large geographic separation, the differences were sufficient for the recognition of two new African genera, now named Bergbambos and Oldeania, after their local names in the Afrikaans and Maasai languages.
The species are now Bergbambos tessellata, and Oldeania alpine. Their description appears in the open access journal PhytoKeys.
“The features and DNA of the African bamboos are certainly different to those of East Asia, but it is still not clear whether they are really different enough to represent ancestors of all the Asian bamboos.”
“It will be necessary to hunt out and study mountain bamboos of Sri Lanka and Madagascar and to include them in a broader analysis to be sure.”
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Bibliographic information: Chris Stapleton. 2013. Bergbambos and Oldeania, new genera of African bamboos (Poaceae, Bambusoideae). PhytoKeys 25: 87-103; doi: 10.3897/phytokeys.25.6026
