NIKON D810, lens 60mm f/2.8, ISO 1000, Dec. 11, 2018, by Dr Nicholas Hellmuth
The red “petals” are technically called bracts, or can be called leaves. The actual flower is the dozen tiny things inside the bright red area.
The poinsettia plants you buy in the supermarket are botanically modified from a parent stock from northern Mexico almost a century ago.
But this flower, Euphorbia pulcherrima, and its relatives are found in ravines and other areas in the Highlands of Guatemala.
We have poinsettia plants growing outside all year long. And they do start blooming just before Christmas, so here are some quick snapshots from about 3 meters away from my desk. The leaves behind are a special morning glory vine whose juice can be used to vulcanize rubber by the Maya 2000 years ago.
From left to right: María Reneé Ayau, Dr. Nicholas Hellmuth, Marcelo Girón, María J. García, Pablo M. Lee, Flor Setina, Paulo Nuñez and Juan C. Hernández.
FLAAR has had a team at this show for over a decade because it is international, so people from all countries come here. Plus SGI is the first major printer and visual communications expo of each year.
SGI is capably organized by IEC (International Expo Consults). We see their team also at other trade shows on many other continents. While at SGI 2019 we will be looking at UV-curing printers, latex printers, solvent, water-based, and textile printers, plus the inks, printable materials, laminators, cutters, and other workflow equipment. Also we will visit the booth and team of ME Printer magazine, one of the leading trade magazines for the Middle East.
FLAAR is presently working with Parque Nacional Yaxha Nakum Naranjo in Peten, Guatemala on the educational signage for the Mayan temples, pyramids, palaces, ballcourts and awesome flowering plants of the surrounding rain forest. Plus Dr Nicholas has an additional team working on educational material for primary schools around this archaeological park.
We hope to see you at SGI Dubai 2019, January 13, 14, and 15.
Ipomoea alba at our Maya Research garden. Photo taken with a Nikon D5, natural light, no flash, Gitzo tripod, 6:15pm, August 1. 2018. These "morning glory" flowers bloom at night so they are called Moonflowers (by the next day they look wilted before noon time)
Latex sap from native Mayan rubber tree (Castilla elastica) does not bounce until it is vulcanized. So the Maya game balls would not bounce until the rubber they are made from is vulcanized.
The Olmec already developed vulcanization over 3000 years ago! The Maya (and all their neighbors) had several different plants (mostly vines) which produce sulfur. Simply add the juice from these vines (when squeezed), add it to latex, heat it, and your rubber is ready to bounce.
We raise two of the different kinds of vines which have this sulfur content. Last night the Ipomoea alba bloomed at about 6:18pm (this is why a member of the morning glory genus is called a Moonflower).
Here are four different parts of the opening sequence to enjoy looking at.
LiDAR aerial photography has suggested “millions more Maya” lived in their homelands than previously estimated. What foods were available to feed all these LiDAR suggested people over 1500 years ago?
Even before LiDAR began, the team of FLAAR (USA) and FLAAR Mesoamerica (Guatemala) has been working for many years on improving the 1938 list by Carnegie Institution of Washington explorer and ethnobotanist Cyrus Lundell of Plants probably utilized by the Old Empire Maya of Peten and adjacent Lowlands.
Lundell’s decade of work in Campeche and Peten lists several dozen fruits; the FLAAR list by Hellmuth is over 126 fruits: all native to Mayan areas of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Maya portions of Honduras and El Salvador.
But there is one fruit missing in all recent botanical monographs on agroforestry and books on edible and medicinal plants of Belize (surely there must be a book from year 2000 onward that features this fruit, but we have not yet found it).
This same fruit is missing from Lundell and we have not yet found it in any recent book on edible and medicinal plants of Peten.
The same fruit is missing from the most recent monograph on ethnobotany of the Lacandon Maya area of Chiapas.
And this fruit was missing from Hellmuth’s list also!
But last week we found a tree with more than 200+ healthy fruits; we did hour after hour of research
and this tree is indeed listed as native to Mexico, Guatemala and Belize!
We will be posting an entire page on this tree; and a separate FLAAR reports photo album during August.
We at FLAAR have the following goals:
Help archaeologists by providing lists of the edible native plants available to the Maya thousands of years ago.
Help improve the health of the Mayan-speaking people today (and all their neighbors) by providing lists not only of all edible plants but also their vitamins, minerals, protein and other health benefits.
Help protect endangered species and fragile eco-systems.
Make lists of which pollinators pollinate each edible plant and encourage saving these pollinators from extinction.
Village leaders of Aldea Cerro Azul, Municipio Chisec, Guatemala, and their families receive our donation of the first of two 5-meter long full-color printout of waterbirds of Guatemala. The school teachers can then cut each bird into a rectangular poster to put on the walls or windows of the school. All the renderings of each bird are by the illustrators of FLAAR Mesoamerica.
Village leaders of Aldea Cerro Azul, Municipio Chisec, Guatemala, and their families receive our donation of the first of two 5-meter long full-color printout of waterbirds of Guatemala. The school teachers can then cut each bird into a rectangular poster to put on the walls or windows of the school. All the renderings of each bird are by the illustrators of FLAAR Mesoamerica.
One of our goals is to assist local people to learn about the endangered species, especially birds, mammals and pollinators. So the graphic designers and illustrators of FLAAR Mesoamerica in Guatemala prepare educational drawings of all the species of interest.
We then take these drawings to printer expos and various companies that know FLAAR Reports do the printing for us. We then fly these horizontal banners back to Guatemala and drive several days to reach remote settlements.
This Q’eqchi’ Mayan aldea is best reached by 4WD double-cabin pickup truck. We visited with the village leaders. They asked assistance with respect improve methods for pumping water from a cave, since the village’s previous water source went dry in past months. Before we hiked several kilometers to reach the cave spring, we showed the village leaders and their families the kinds of material we were preparing for local schools. They eagerly expressed interest in having these banners for their schools, so we donated the two banners that we happened to have.
We will return to this area in the future and donate additional educational material. What would most help would be if a foundation, corporation, individual, or embassy program could print the books we have ready for primary schools (www.MayanToons.org). These books are ready in Spanish, English, and Q’eqchi’ Mayan languages. The local teachers have told us they prefer if everything can be in those three languages.
FLAAR (USA) and FLAAR Mesoamerica (Guatemala) are also seeking funds to assist our project on pollinators (more than just bees, butterflies and bats). We would like to prepare banners showing all major pollinators in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador.
Since we provide all staff flexible working hours, it is rare for 100% of the FLAAR teams to be present at any one time. But today was the birthday celebration for three different employees, so at least 90% of the teams were here at one time.
You can see the Q’eqchi’ and Kakchiquel Mayan student interns and the multitude of university students who work at FLAAR.
We have several teams: digital imaging printing, and flora and fauna. The flora and fauna is in two joint teams: studying plants and animals and doing storyboards and illustrations for educational comic books on endangered species of Guatemala. Our web sites on plants, animals, and how to do high res photography are read by about 600,000+ people.
The digital imaging team does marketing and technology research on UV-curing printers, textile inks, textile printers and textile printing workflow, cutters, laminators, color management, RIP and other software and hardware. The FLAAR web sites on these topics are read by over half a million people around the world (different people than read the plants and animals web sites).
So altogether, our entire coverage of research is read by over a million people.
Ten of us, in two 4WD double-cabin pickup trucks, did a field trip deep into the remotest parts of the jungle-covered mountains of Guatemala, Central America, to test methods to render Mayan thatch-roofed houses in 3-dimensional imaging. We used a drone and drone pilot, and university students who are studying digital imaging and biology.
This week, two of us are in Dubai to study wide-format inkjet printing and signage technology. We will be testing which inkjet printers and toner printers can best produce high-resolution photographs of these Mayan houses, plus which printers can best show high-resolution digital photographs of rare Neotropical flowers and jaguars.
