Progress of a Sort
The infection I mentioned earlier has progressed dramatically in a few weeks. When I looked more closely at past photos of this plant, I noticed some subtle stippling on the blossoms which may have been a clue to a problem that was present for years without my recognizing it. See photos! Of course the plant has been isolated from the rest of my collection and I have relentlessly discarded any apparatus that might have been contaminated. I tested one other orchid of similar vintage (Lc. Nancie Thomas x Lc. Persepolis 'Splendor' AM/AOS) that had some ugly leaves on it and that one tested NEGATIVE. I did some reading and found that ORSV is also known as Tobacco Mosaic Virus - Orchid variety (TMV-O) and is ubiquitous in nature, also extremely hardy. For example, fertile spores have been found in cigarettes where you would think nothing could live. For those unclear as to the difference, a virus is NOT a living organism like a bacterium. The spores are basically encapsulated heredity (RNA) and it is the resilience of the capsule that makes them so hard to eradicate. Drugs that kill bacteria don't work on viruses because they have no metabolism of their own that we can poison (they use host cell metabolism to reproduce). We have a very sad example of what a virus can do in West Africa today (Ebola), influenza has killed countless millions, and HIV remains a difficult problem.
Last edited by jmrathbun; 08-19-2014 at 04:30 PM..
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Hybrid Mode
