Piper biseriatum
Large shrub. Can reach heights of 4-5m.
Has erect, white inflorescences. The leaves are pubescent. The stems and petioles are covered in hairy trichomes.
Has sheathing petioles that serve as domatia for mutualistic ants (Tepe et al., 2007).
This information is based an ongoing project dedicated to the inventory and dissemination of information on lepidopteran larvae, their host plants, and their parasitoids in a Costa Rican tropical wet forest.
N=130 herbivore associations as of 2012.
Bombycidae: Zolessia felderi (Druce); N=2.
Erebidae: Isanthrene championii (Druce); N=1.
Geometridae: Eois apyraria (Guenee); N=112, Eois nympha (Schaus); N=11.
Hesperiidae: Quadrus cerialis (Stoll); N=1.
N=2 herbivore associations with the historically classified Piper auritifolium Trel. (synonym) as of 2012.
Geometridae: Eois nympha (Schaus); N=2.
Larval lepidopteran herbivores reared in Heredia Province, Costa Rica (La Selva Biological Station).
For Piper phylogeny see attached pdf (Jaramillo et al., 2008).
For original publication details of Piper biseriatum see: Bot. Gaz. 70(3): 178 178 1920.
P. biseriatum is distributed from Nicaragua to Peru.
Information on distribution was provided by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Herbarium.
Larval lepidopteran herbivores collected from P. biseriatum in Heredia Province, Costa Rica (La Selva Biological Station).
Piper biseriatum is considered to be a facultative myrmecophyte. This is based on the observation that approximately half of the individual plants sampled possessed ant-associations.
The domatia in which the ants nest are formed by the plant's sheathing petioles and are occupied by several unrelated ant species, including: Crematogaster spp., Solenopsis spp., Wasmannia spp. and Pheidole spp.
For more information on this ant-plant association and other ant-plant associations in the Piper section Macrostachys, see attached pdf (Tepe et al., 2007).
Member of Piper section Macrostachys.
A number of synonyms for the accepeted name, Piper biseriatum C. DC. have been acknowledged by The Plant List.