The next night these open straight up and a most amazing sight is seen. The scarab beetles emerge through the opening and are covered in pollen. And they keep coming having spent the last two to three days trapped in the flower. The flower has now changed from female white flower to a male pink flower. On the first two nights the flowers produce syrup in the inner chamber, which the beetles feed on. Karanambu Lodge’s Diane McTurk has always maintained that these beetles have a drunken orgy going round and round this phallic pillar in the chamber. Pollination is achieved by this species of Dynastid beetle, the Golden Scarab or Cyclocephala colasi (Seymore and Schultz 1997). It is not unusual for up to thirty beetles to enter one flower. At Karanambu Lodge, ninetyseven beetles were once counted entering one flower (Diane McTurk and Kenneth Mandook, Personal Communication). Lily Ponds are noted for having lots of fish, Black Caiman, Spectacled Caiman, Giant River Otters and Birds. The fish, especially the small ones like to hide under the large lily pads for protection. The large wading birds like the Jabiru Stork, Cocoi Heron, Great Egret, Snowy Egret, Striated Heron, Boat-billed Heron, Black-crowned Night Heron and the Neotropical Cormorant like to fish from the large lily pads or nearby floating grass islands, waiting for fish to
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pass by. Black Caiman and Giant River Otters frequently hunt for the abundant fish under the lily pads. The arapaima (Arapaima gigas) fish can also often be observed in the lily ponds in the Rewa and Rupununi Rivers. I remember my Grandmother telling me of the way it was when the well to do of Georgetown society strolled the avenues
admiring the flowers and leaf pads in the trenches and canals, and inhaling the sweet perfume carried by the afternoon breezes around the city. Many of the children will never see the Victoria Amazonica in its full glory in the ponds and lakes of the Rupununi savannahs. But I do wish that our National Flower could return to a few of Georgetown’s canals.