Diario de peri3

There are lots of samphires. They are mostly greenish. Nine times out of ten if you take a flying shot of them as you gallop past they will stay in the Needs ID section of iNat for an age. Or more. Frustrating. So how to take pictures of a samphire so that someone who knows them can identify your specimen, or confirm your ID if you know what it is?
First, you need several pictures. One at least to capture the habitat. Is it intertidal or up above the tides? Inland? On the pan of a salt lake?
These Salicornia quinqueflora are clearly intertidal, growing near the mangroves, and the plants form a lawn of low growing plants that root at their nodes.

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In contrast, Sea beans (Tecticornia lepidosperma) is an upright shrub, seen here sheltering on saline soils in front of a stand of swamp paperbark.

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And check out this skinny branched samphire on a salt lake, down slope from some Allocasuarinas - it almost looks like a grazed baby Allocasuarina itself. It is Tecticornia lylei, the casuarina samphire.

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If your habitat shot captures the general morpphology of the plant, well and good. If not, take another that shows whether the plant is a shrubby bush or a decumbent sward. Making a comment about height is good here, or having something in the shot that indicates relative size.

Now the closeup fun starts. It is worthwhile having something for scale in these shots too, but that may be stretching a friendship. The vegetative articles, the flowering spike, some older dried fruit. Take as many pictures as you can. If you use an app like Mag.Light on your phone you can get right up close and personal.

Some samphires, like this Tecticornia halocnemoides, have grey gnarly woody stems and just a few small vegetative articles at the ends of the branches.

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Some have large articles with "keels" on the "corners" of the articles, like this Tecticornia indica.

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And some have skinny vegetative articles that look like she-oak branches - this is Tecticornia lylei.

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Then there are the flowering/fruiting spikes. Here is Tecticornia lepidosperma. Look how long it is! Yes, that is an average sized hand... See how the top of the spike tapers in this species? Look further down the spike and you can see the neat arrangement of the green fleshy flowers in sets of three.

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And here is the flowering spike of Tecticornia flabelliformis, showing its separated bracts under each triad of flowers.

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Some flowering spikes are all nipply and relatively (for samphires) brightly coloured... like Tecticornia lylei

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Finally, take a poke at some of those old fruits. Do they crumble in your hands and reveal black seeds (Tecticornia pergranulata)? Do they break up into neat rings (Tecticornia pruinosa)?

Here is Waxy samphire (T pruinosa) with its fruiting spikes starting to break up.

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And here are the seeds of the Blackseed samphire, T pergranulata.

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Some samphire seeds are very fancy. These are from Tecticornia lepidosperma.

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Samphires are one group of plants that you need to take a moment with, in order to get an identification. But once you start to look closely at them, they will never look "all the same" to you again!

Ever put a photo of a samphire up on iNat, to have it languish unidentified for months? It is a problem that is common in plant groups that don't have flashy flowers, or where many species look very similar. So how to increase your chances of a successful identification? The tips below should help. They look at photographing an important samphire, Tecticornia arbuscula, the shrubby samphire. There is a current project looking at the health of this species in Southern Australia. Check it out at https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/shrubby-samphires-and-climate-change

First up, a photo of the entire bush in its habitat tells potential identifiers a lot - is it a low prostrate plant or an upright shrub? Near the sea? Inland? The shrubby samphire in this photo https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/43537254 is clearly a large shrub. In this photo you can see the woody structure of these long-lived plants: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/44119604. And in this photo the shrubs are clearly growing in the intertidal zone - they are at least double the height of the sea rush that grows with them: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/46912966.

Next we zoom in to look for flowering spikes. Flowers on samphires are greenish, and are arranged in groups around a spike. Each group is separated from the group above by a bract of fleshy material. All greenish! The flowers of Tecticornia arbuscula actually hide down behind the bracts BUT a closeup photo will often reveal the single female flower on each side of the flower spike. You can see the divided stigmas sticking out in this iNat record https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/45466897

As the fruits mature, the flesh of the bract yellows and shrinks back a bit around the fruit, which is buried close to the stem. The woody female style which was topped with those delicate stigmas dries and hardens, and remains sticking out of the fruiting body, like little Pinnochio noses. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/36479163

A set of pictures that includes these details is simple to identify, and will result in your contribution bring rapidly identified.

So, a few years ago I was trundling around the Eyre Peninsula collecting photographs of samphires for a new book (Samphires of the Eyre Peninsula). At the same time, I vouchered several species that were of particular interest - some odd forms of Tecticornia halocnemoides, and new records of species not well known locally, some species I had no photographs of...
When I voucher, as well as placing a field tag on the specimen, I record the field data on my Eco:Maps app on my phone. And it snaps a shot of the plant that I am vouchering. The photos I have put up of these EP samphires, therefore, are all tied back to vouchers held in the Adelaide Herbarium. If you need to visit those vouchers at any time, let me know and I can give you the field voucher number, BDBSA Survey number and and observer number, which will allow you to locate them in the herbarium.
The Eco:Maps photos are not always ideal from an identification point of view, but there are additional photographs of the diagnostic features of each of these species in the book.

https://www.naturalresources.sa.gov.au/files/sharedassets/eyre_peninsula/plants_and_animals/2018-samphires-of-the-eyre-peninsula-booklet-gen.pdf?BestBetMatch=samphire|4d090124-f3d8-4557-9b86-0d101df97e20|46d71422-ee72-40ae-9a97-a32b00c7f5a3|