Phaedranssa lehmannii
Nolo Contendere (Sun, 16 May 2010 14:26:55 PDT)

Dear David,

I have a Ecuadorean PhD. student, Nora Oleas, who is working on
Phaedranssa in my lab. We have sought material of P. lehmannii from
which to extract DNA, to no avail, as Colombia has become very difficult
to obtain permission for collections. In the 1990's I was sent a
specimen, unfortunately without flowers, supposedly of this species,
collected a few years previously from near the type locality by Jorge
Ramos, at that time curator of the herbarium of the Universidad del
Valle in Cali. We tried extracting DNA from this specimen as well,
unsuccessfully. I searched around in type locality for this plant in
1984 and turned up nothing, though I did find P. ventricosa Baker near
Purace. Currently, several Colombian colleagues are keeping their eyes
open when they are in the vicinity of the original collections.

I've seen the type specimen, as well as collection made by Mulford
Foster in the 1940's, and we have no reason to believe that it
represents anything other than a species of Phaedranassa. No material
of that genus has ever been collected in Peru (though a synonym of
Rauhia multiflora is Phaedranaas megistophylla).

Alan Meerow