Catasetum x tapiriceps (yellow)

[Jan Pahl]

Well I lost almost all flowers because of some thick-fat beetle worms inside the flowers but at least I have something to show.

This particular x tapiriceps was found naturalized in Caracas growing in a large "fish tail palm" (Caryota mitis) which is also no autoctonous (is from South-Asia) but is often used here in urban gardens and as a street tree... showing that Catasetum have the ability to adapt to new environments if they have their pollinators (in this case pileatum and macrocarpum share the same odour compounds, so the hybrid between them also does). We have to remember that x tapiriceps grows a 1000 kilometers away from Caracas, in a more wet area and 700-900 meters bellow Caracas altitude.... and none had found tapiriceps on table mountains, the more similar environment tapiricep have inside their natural habitat.

I end this post noticing that flowers with the days ends in a bright canary yellow, but since I had the beetle problem I couldn't wait the 5 days they need to do that because this flowers have poison on it and surely are going to drop in 1 or 2 days, that's why I took the photo wen still is apple-green-yellowish

[Gena]

Love this one, Jan!
Now you see that it can be advantageous to grow Catasetums in the living room .... just because there is no "thick-fat beetle worm" there

[Jan Pahl]

Originally Posted by Gena

Love this one, Jan!
Now you see that it can be advantageous to grow Catasetums in the living room .... just because there is no "thick-fat beetle worm" there

you are right, at least in Sweden they lack natural enemies....

At least grow under more difficult to achieve controlled conditions had to have other plus to pay the extra grower efforts

[Jan Pahl]

This plates belong to the Swiss Orchid Foundation and they show the extraordinary complexity xtapiriceps had, and I said "had" in past tense because more "pileatum" tapiriceps shown here in the vast majority of plates, are much more less common now than 100 years ago, so many things shown here aren't going to show again on nature unless the wild population is put under less pressure and for them the hybrid had the chance to again show past glory.

Jan

[Jan Pahl]

Something interesting among Catasetinae, is that phenotype can be deceitful.... Catasetum have a lot of new evolutionary traits at the "same time", so for that reason genes that control other group of loci expression hasn't had enough evolutionary time to show good control over phenotype expression...

And what in the hell that means?????

what I mean is that if you cross lets say Guarianthe skinneri x Guarianthe aurantiaca, all the offspring is going to be on the geometrical median between species and only posterior selfins, siblings or back crossings are going to show considerable regression to one of the parents. But with Catasetum on first generation hybrids the geometrical median can have much broader spectrum, even part of the offspring couldn't be separated from one of the parent phenotype, something that even show in catasetinae intergeneric hybrids... Them, even if lets say a macrocarpum almost alike tapiriceps could have much more macrocarpum genes on it as expected, their still is a considerable chance that even this almost macrocarpum could be the result of 50/50 % of contribution even if phenotype tells the contrary

The thing could be even more interesting, I personally had seen tapiriceps that change labelum phenotype from one year to the other... On this matter we could "blame" many things like between years environmental changes and/or cultural ones, but the thing is that this reflect poor control on gene expression difficult to see (at least at this scale), even in the more complex Cattleya hybrids.

Jan

P.D. Bruno,is you are reading me, please see the plate 302804.jpg... it look very much to your "saccatum" hybrid I call "dunsterville"

[Gena]

WOW!!!! Just WOW!!!! Such beautiful pictures!!!