Tumakurense

Subject – Environment

Context – New plant found in Tumakuru takes the district’s name.

Concept –

A new plant of the Brachystelma R.Br. species has been found in Tumakuru, and has been named after the district from where its type material was collected. ‘B. tumakurense’ comes from a tuber and belongs to the Apocynaceae family (a family of flowering plants).
Brachystelma R.Br. is the second largest genus in the tribe Ceropegieae with over 116 species distributed in the old world tropics. They are slender stemmed with a brilliant display of colours in their flowers, especially in their corolla and coronal structures.
They are mainly distributed in Peninsular India in dry hill ranges. There are seven species from Karnataka. All of them exhibit erect stems and are nonclimbing in nature.