Mammillaria pseudohalbingeri n.n.

Does anyone know about published information on this species name? I know it comes from north western Oaxaca, from various locations, as in ML259 from km 97 of MEX190 and TL303 from Santiago Apaola. I've only small seedlings so far, and it is obviously of the Supertextae series...but??

All information very gratefully received...references to publications etc..

Thanks

No Chris,

I've got no information about pseudohalbingeri. Although I know this specie, I never had it in my collection . I put it on my wish list.

If there are big enough, Hugo, I'll bring one or two of the TL numbered plant for you to ELK. They only germinated this year, but doing well so far.

In flower this plant from U.K. Mammillaria Reference Collection (received in 2010)....

Mammillaria pseudohalbingeri ML 259




.. but Michel Lacoste publish in Mammillarias.net this one in the wild.....

They are too different....
Is there anyone who has information or photographs that can clarify the doubts?

Here are my two kinds of M. pseudohalbingeri, the first TL303, and the second Rog405. I also have ML259 which looks more like your cultivated plant. I'd take a photo of it, but it is packed in my car ready for a show tomorrow!





As it isn't a described species, it is difficult to say exactly what it is. It wouldn't surprise me if when Lacoste found a plant which didn't look right for M. halbingeri nor for any of the forms he recognised which now are lumped into M. albilanata oaxacana, he made up this name. The same might be true for Rogozinski and for Linzen, and looking at where their plants come from they are relatively well separated. So whether they were looking at a good species with some variability, or whether they were just forms of different species, I guess it would be difficult to say without a proper description, and some detail assessment by an open minded botanist - if you can find one!

However, plants in habitat can look very different to those in cultivation, spine numbers, lengths and colours can be different - usually more spines, longer, and generally whiter. Wool also develops better in the Mexican sun, and the body shape tends to be flatter.

Thanks to the contribution and photographic documents...

In nature the plants are often more densely spined than in cultivation, because we simply cannot provide the same amount of light as in Mexico. So I think that the plant of Maurillo is indeed the same taxon as the habitat plant of Lacoste.
ML 259 is listed by Michel Lacoste as M. pseudohalbingeri and in brackets: = M. elegans. He adds that these plants are characterized by the fairly large carmine flowers which Maurillo's ML 259 also has. He adds that he found this population of M. elegans as indicated by Glass and Foster.
Rog 405 is listed as M. spec. in his most recent field list, issued by the German Mammillaria Society. However, in his 1998 trip report it was listed as M. pseudohalbingeri n.n.
TL 299 through TL 303 are all M. pseudohalbingeri n.n.
Last year, at the fall meeting of the AfM, Klaus Rebmann gave a talk about several mammillaria populations which he had found around the village of Apoala. Although often no more than a few hundred meters apart, the plants of the separate populations could look totally different, yet they had to be the same species. Apparently, different habitat conditions could produce completely differently looking plants. Names suggested for these plants were e.g. M. pseudohalbingeri and M. ignota, but no one really could say with certainty which species it was. I was amazed by the huge differences among plants within such a short distance of each other.
Actually, TL 303 is from Apoala.
I am not sure, but I think that the name pseudohalbingeri has been put forward by Rogozinski and Linzen.

Wolter ten Hoeve

That's very interesting, Wolter. There's not a great distance between the locations of ML259 and TL303, about 35kms, and from TL303 to Rog405 about 22kms. They are all in the area where distributions of plants in M. haageana and M. albilanata oaxacana complexes overlap. So it may not be too surprising that some of these populations of plants are even more variable than elsewhere.

Not that far from the ML259 location, in 2005 I found a small population of plants that I couldn't immediately identify - well, no great surprise there!

Along the way up the MEX135D, I had seen several different looking plants, which were to me at that time just various forms of M. haageana, but on closer inspection it was the last one of the three that puzzled me more than the others. When I showed John Pilbeam the photo, he believed that he had seen similar plants near there also, but had never got an ID on them.

These were the plants I saw:







Having seen so much variability of form in both the M. haageana and the M. albilanata complexes, it would be easy just to lump them in to one or other of these, but it is the last one that makes me wonder a bit more.