Alice Springs Field Naturalists Club newsletter
ASFNC newsletter
Alice Springs Field Naturalists Club
Alice Springs Field Naturalists Club newsletter; E-Journals; PublicationNT; Alice Springs Field Naturalists Club newsletter
2016-11-01
Alice Springs
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Biology; Natural history; Alice Springs (N.T.); Periodicals
Alice Springs Field Naturalists Club
Alice Springs
Alice Springs Field Naturalists Club newsletter
Newsletter, November 2016
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Alice Springs Field Naturalists Club.
https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2019C00042
https://hdl.handle.net/10070/264225
https://hdl.handle.net/10070/470171
Alice Springs Field Naturalists Club November 2016 9 Acacia sessiliceps (Curly Pod Wattle) flowering in the Intertexta Forest Barb Gilfedder This is quite an uncommon species that I havent seen flowering before. I knew there was one tree of this species in the Intertexta Forest but I was unaware of this one, until the flowers called my attention to it. It is the small tree in the centre of the picture below, dwarfed by the big EucalyptusiIntertexta behind it. Sessiliceps means stalkless. Peter Latz says it is the camels second favourite food plant after the Quandong tree, Santalum acuminatum. I looked it up on the new NTFlora website, which is a mine of information about native plants and seems relatively easy to use. This is what it says on the factsheet about A.sessiliceps, as well as showing 3 photos and giving access to herbarium collection details. So there is good information in simple language with not too many words to look up. Diagnostic Characters: Acacia sessiliceps is a shrub or small tree to about 7 m high, with dark persistent fissured bark. The branchlets have short hairs and the phyllodes are glabrous or have appressed hairs. The phyllodes are terete to flat, linear, green to grey-green, mostly 40-90 mm long and 0.8-1.8 mm wide, with 1 marginal gland near the base, and several parallel main nerves and additional slightly less prominent parallel veins between. The flowers are in pale yellow globular heads arranged singly on hairy peduncles 0-2 mm long. The pods are linear-oblong, mostly 52-250 mm long, 5-12 mm wide, distinctly curved to twisted or coiled, and the seeds have a yellow or orange aril. Acacia sessiliceps is sometimes synonymised under A. oswaldii, but is here treated as a distinct taxon. A similar taxon with broader phyllodes and a slightly different habit occurs in arid NT near salt lakes to the south of the MacDonnell Ranges bioregion. That taxon is tentatively placed under Acacia oswaldii, however it is not a particularly good match for the type of the species, which was collected on the Murray River in South Australia Photos: a close-up of the flowers (right) and the pods (left). Pods photo taken in Rainbow Valley in 2013.