Salsola baryosma (Schultes, 1820) Dandy

Falatoury, Atiye Nejad, Iamonico, Duilio & Freitag, Helmut, 2017, Nomenclature of Caroxylon imbricatum s. lat. (Amaranthaceae / Chenopodiaceae), with a new combination at variety rank, Phytotaxa 331 (1), pp. 101-108 : 104

Salsola baryosma and Salsola foetida by Moquin-Tandon

The basionym of Salsola baryosma is Chenopodium baryosmon Schultes (1820: 269) that was validated with a short diagnosis and a detailed description. The citation “ SALSOLA foetida Delisle [= Delile, obviously an orthographic error] Descript. de l’Egypte n. 310 ” refers to the name invalidly published by Delile (see discussion above). Provenance and collector were also given as “ In Aegypto superiore; Tentyrae [Dendera] Sieber ”. As Delile (1813: 57) did not validly publish the name Salsola foetida (see above), Schultes’ name Chenopodium baryosmon can be interpreted as a new species, and at the same time as validation of Delile’s species (published as Salsola foetida , nom. inval.) with the new name.

Chenopodium baryosmon was recombined as Salsola baryosma by Dandy in Andrew (1950: 111) and since then used in several regional floras (see Introduction above). Recently Theodorova (2015: 443) transferred the species to the genus Nitrosalsola Tzvelev (1993: 80) but the renaming does not appear to be sufficiently justified from a phylogenetic viewpoint and is not yet generally accepted.

Botschantzev (1975: 168) cited two specimens preserved at BM and LE as, respectively, the “type” and isotype. That view was overtaken by Freitag (1989) and Boulos (1991), and the first author added two further isotypes kept in E and K. However, though no holotype has been explicitely indicated by Schultes (1820: 269), they mentioned just one specimen in the protologue that he studied in his own herbarium (“Specimen nostrum ex Herb. Sieberiano …”). Schultes worked in the former small Bavarian university of Landshut, whose herbarium was later, at least to a bigger part, transferred to the Munich herbarium that today keeps many Schultes types (pers. comm. by H.-J. Esser). Consequently we started the search for the putative holotype in M, and indeed there a specimen was traced “ex herbario Musei bot. Landishuth” (M0243779, see Fig. 2 ) that fits in all details, in particular in size and length of branches, in Schultes’ protologue. It was tempting to approve it as holotype, but unfortunately the specimen lacks any annotation of Schultes and the labels are not written by Schultes himself. Therefore we can not exclude the possibility that the Munich specimen is a post-1820 accession to the former Landshut herbarium. We also asked the curators of other herbaria that might have original Schultes specimen (B, BAS, HAL, Z) but they did not detect any. In this situation we think that it is better to follow Botschantzev (1975) whose choice of a BM specimen from among many other duplicates of the respective Sieber collection can be considered as effective lectotypification, even if the specimen is not the best suited one. However, two specifications appear to be needed: (1) The “type” is understood as the lectotype, not holotype as it could be interpreted from the original context. (2) From the two Sieber specimens in the BM identified as Salsola baryosma by Botschantzev, barcodes BM000910454 and BM000793154 (left-hand plant) the first one, with Botschantzev’s label “Typus”, is the lectotype. Corresponding isolectotypes are kept in BR (from herb. Martius), E, G (from herb. Moricand), K, LE, and M.

Moquin-Tandon (1840: 143) accepted Delile’s “ Salsola foetida ”, and provided a description [corrected citation should be Salsola foetida Delile ex Moq. ≡ Caroxylon foetidum Moquin-Tandon (1849: 178) ]. However, Moquin-Tandon (1840) did not mention the earlier validation of the name by Sprengel (1824) and, moreover, made his S. foetida superfluous and illegitimate under Art. 52.2 since the valid name Chenopodium baryosmon was cited in synonymy.

Figures

FIGURE 2. Isolectotype of Chenopodium baryosmon (≡ Salsola baryosma), eventually the only actual specimen of the species seen by Schultes (by courtesy of the Bayerische Staatssammlungen München, M).