Bolivian Flora y Fauna: The Millennial Plant

(Léase en español / Read in Spanish)

Have you ever looked carefully at carpet? I mean very carefully? Like, right up close, nose-in-the-carpet carefully? It doesn’t look the same does it? What appears from a distance to be a single smooth covering ends up being just many small tufts of fabric bunched up together. That’s basically what we have with this month’s mystery macro.

Of course the photo had the added mystery of a rounded glob of something shiny. There were some good guesses. (1) Ice formed on a small variety of succulent, (2) The abdomen of a flying insect over a plant similar to hens and chicks, with two guesses about hens and chicks, (3) A plant that grows green leaves like flowers and has small red flowers, and (4) someone that had no idea, but hoped to find out soon. Sadly nobody guessed correctly. Here’s another view of the photo from which the mystery macro was taken:

With my finger in the frame, you can tell that the leaves are extremely tiny. But what
is it? This is the Yareta (yah-RAY-tah) or Azorella compacta in the Apiaceae family. (In Spanish it is also spelled Llareta, but pronounced the same.) From a distance it appears to be one single mass of green.

But now you know the truth! It is really many very tiny plants bunched up close together. The word ‘compacta’ in its scientific name implies that it grows in compact or tight-knit formation. These are called colonies. So each glob is really a colony of hundreds or thousands of these tiny plants.

Yareta is only found in Bolivia, Peru, Chile and Argentina, and only at altitudes between 3,200 and 4,500 meters above sea level (10,500 to 14,800 feet). At those altitudes the air is thinner, and it gets quite cold at night. But that’s where the plant’s compact colonies have an advantage. Being so close-knit they conserve heat, and by growing low to the ground they benefit from the heat that radiates off of the ground at night.

The yareta is an evergreen perennial so these green globs dot the landscape year round. Do they flower? Yes, but unfortunately for me we were not in the area at the right time of year to see the flowers. But I am told that these are also tiny and range in color from pink to lavender.

But what about that clear droplet dripping down the surface as seen in the first photo? You can clearly see now that it isn’t an insect, although in the macro shot I could see the resemblance in form to the abdomen of an insect. It looks more like a drop of water making its way down, doesn’t it? But it isn’t water either. What is it?

It is sap. Inside the plant is a resin-like substance that occasionally oozes out and drips down the surface (slowly of course, like very cold honey). And just like the sap in a pine tree, the sap in the yareta is flammable. Traditionally the plant was harvested by indigenous communities and used for fuel. Then when commercial mining moved into the region, it was used as fuel in even greater quantities. This rapid removal was viewed as a threat to the survival of the yareta and so all four countries in which it grows now prohibit its extraction. Why the concern?

Colonies of yareta grow extremely slowly. Our Bolivian guide during a recent trip through southwestern Bolivia told us it grows only one millimeter per year. Recent scientific studies put the maximum growth rate at about 1.5 centimeters (0.6 inches) per year. But that is still very slow. Not fast enough for mass harvesting as fuel.

Take a look at the difference in size of the yareta colonies in the next two pictures. You can see my shoe at the bottom of each photo as a reference to the size.

At a growth rate of 1.5 centimeters per year, the larger one could be over 100 years older than the smaller one. And it is said that some colonies have been around for 3,000 years. This has earned it the title among the local residents of ‘the millennial plant’ or ‘the thousand-year old plant’.

Wouldn’t it be great to live that long or longer? I’d love to do a time-lapse photography sequence of a yareta colony from year Zero to year 3,000! Hmmm, you know... maybe I will!