Nephrodium variabile Hook.
Ctenitis troupinii Pic.Serm.

Rhizome long-creeping and slender. Fronds monomorphic, spaced, thin-textured. Stipe 50–100 cm long, strawcoloured to reddish, dark base with sparse covering of short glandular hairs and few narrowly lanceolate dark brown scales 7 x 0.5 mm. Lamina 3–4-pinnatifid, deltoid in outline, 47–60 x 60–74 cm, mid green above, yellowish green below; pinnae in ± 13 pairs, apical pinnae gradually decrescent, lowest four pinnae remote; basal pinna pair to 42 cm long, bearing 6–7 pairs of stalked pinnules and several pairs of sessile or adnate ones, the basal basiscopic pinnule pair to 20 x 6 cm; second pinna-pair 26–35 cm, with long basiscopic pinnule; basiscopic pinnules of other pinnae becoming more equal to acroscopic ones; ultimate segments to 5 mm wide, rounded, margin entire or slightly crenate; venation not reaching margin; rhachis with adaxial groove; pinna-costae and costae densely covered in short, glandular hairs 0.05–0.7 mm long, later increasingly hairless, adaxially veins and veinlets covered in hairs to 1 mm long, a few hairs on lamina near margin. Sori 2–7 per segment, median on acroscopic veinlet, ± 1 mm in diameter; exindusiate or with indusium to 1 mm in diameter.

troupinii: after G.M.D.J. Troupin (1923-1997); Belgian botanist who worked in Belgian Congo (Zaire, DRC), Rwanda and Sudan. Author of many volumes of Flora of Tropical Africa, Flora Zambesiaca, Flore d'Afrique Centrale.

Moist primary forest.

See African distribution.

Cameroon, Congo, Dem. Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea (incl. Bioko), Gabon, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, Uganda.

Terrestrial.