Corallorhiza maculata Varieties
Tom Chester and Keir Morse
| var. maculata, eastern spotted coralroot, from the New York state area | ||||
Lip ratio 1.10 | 
Lip ratio 1.33 | 
Lip ratio 1.50 | ||
| var. occidentalis, western spotted coralroot, from the northern California Sierra Nevada area | ||||
Lip ratio 1.42 | 
Lip ratio 1.67 | 
Lip ratio 1.90 | ||
| var. ??, spotted coralroot, from San Jacinto Mountain | ||||
Lip ratio 1.28 | 
Lip ratio 1.45 | 
Lip ratio 1.92 | ||
| Fig. 1. First row: var. maculata, eastern spotted coralroot, from near the type locality in New York state. Second row: var. occidentalis, western spotted coralroot, from the northern Sierra Nevada in California, presumably near its type locality. Third row: plants from San Jacinto Mountain. See also the histograms of the lip ratios below. | ||||
Fig. 2. Histograms of the lip width ratio from the New York area and from the northern Sierra Nevada in California, normalized to the same number of plants in each histogram. The histogram for the northern Sierra Nevada has been smoothed by averaging three successive bins, except for the end bins.
Note that the cutoff at a ratio of 1.5, used in the Flora of North America key to discriminate the varieties, works nearly 100% for var. maculata from the New York area, but only 75% of the var. occidentalis from the northern Sierra Nevada falls at 1.5 or above. The smoothness of the histogram argues that all the plants in the northern Sierra Nevada are var. occidentalis, even though the ones with a ratio below 1.5 would key to var. maculata.
Fig. 3. Same as Fig. 2, but now with the histogram for San Jacinto Mountain added. The San Jacinto Mountain histogram appears to be intermediate between that of the New York area and that of the northern Sierra Nevada.