Nepenthes Mikei - Botanical History

Botanical History

Nepenthes mikei was discovered on Mount Pangulubao in September 1989 by Bruce Salmon, Mike Hopkins, and Ricky Maulder, during a Nepenthes expedition to Sumatra. On this trip, the team also found two other undescribed Nepenthes taxa on the mountain: N. ovata and a plant they named N. xiphioides. The latter is now considered a heterotypic synonym of N. gymnamphora.

An early colour photograph of N. mikei was published by Mike Hopkins, Ricky Maulder, and Bruce Salmon, in a 1990 issue of the Carnivorous Plant Newsletter, where the plant was identified simply as Nepenthes sp. 'New Species'. The authors described it as follows:

We saw another Nepenthes that is different than the others we saw in the higher highland areas. It has small pitchers slightly similar to N. tentaculata, N. tobaica and N. gracilis but tougher and thicker. The pitchers are always nicely colored with blackish lines and markings similar to N. fusca. There was very little variation with this species as all mature plants had ample rosettes on the ground and also at intervals up the stem. The stems were slimbing up to about 7 meters and had upper pitchers similar in color and shape to the lower pitchers but with the usual differences. The male inflorescences were about 20 centimeters, peduncle inclusive.

Prior to its description, N. mikei was known as N. minutissima among pitcher plant growers. This name is a nomen nudum (naked name), as it was never formally published.

Nepenthes mikei was formally described by Bruce Salmon and Ricky Maulder in a 1995 issue of the Carnivorous Plant Newsletter. The herbarium specimen B.Salmon & R.Maulder 221719 is the designated holotype, and is deposited at the Auckland Institute and Museum (AK) in Auckland, New Zealand. It was prepared on February 17, 1995, from a plant cultivated in New Zealand, and consists of a vine bearing a female inflorescence, a lower pitcher, and a rosette. The specimen was originally collected in 1989 from a "very steep ridge in wet mossy forest" near the summit of Mount Pangulubao, at an altitude of 2000 m. The authors described the plant as growing "in peaty humus or moss at the base of 5–6 m tall trees". Salmon and Maulder also pressed a second specimen of N. mikei from material collected at the same elevation on Pangulubao. Additional herbarium specimens of N. mikei are known and these show slight morphological variability.

In 1997, Matthew Jebb and Martin Cheek published their monograph "A skeletal revision of Nepenthes (Nepenthaceae)", in which they provided an emended description of N. mikei that encompassed specimens of the closely related, and at the time undescribed, N. angasanensis from Mount Leuser, Goh Lembuh, and the Kappi region. Salmon and Maulder did not support this interpretation and reinstated their original description of N. mikei when they described N. angasanensis in 1999. Jebb and Cheek retained N. angasanensis as a synonym of N. mikei in their 2001 monograph, "Nepenthaceae", writing: "We suspect that it may prove not distinct from N. mikei and here treat it as a synonym."