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New
orchid: 'Lophiaris silverarum' is known to grow only in central Panama
New
orchid: 'Lophiaris silverarum' is known to grow only in central Panama
Date:
April 17,
2014
Source:
University of California - Riverside
Summary:
One day about eight years ago a postdoctoral scholar
and her father were on a field trip in a mountainous area in central Panama
when they stumbled upon an orchid they had never seen before. Unable to
identify it, they contacted an orchid expert. The orchid, which turned out to
be an unnamed species, has now been named after the these two: 'Lophiaris
silverarum.'
......................
One day about eight years ago, Katia Silvera, a postdoctoral
scholar at the University of California, Riverside, and her father were on a
field trip in a mountainous area in central Panama when they stumbled upon an
orchid they had never seen before.
Unable to
identify it, they contacted German Carnevali, a world authority on orchids. The
orchid turned out to be an unnamed species. So Carnevali recently named it
after the Silveras: Lophiaris silverarum.
"Lophiaris"
is the genus name, comprising about 40 species in the world. Carnevali, the
director of the Natural Resources Department at the Scientific Center of
Yucatan, Mexico, announced the new orchid species in a research paper published
in the March issue of the journal Phytotaxa.
Naming a
species is invariably a long process. It can take many years to officially name
a plant species, the time depending on how well the plant group is studied and
whether there is funding to do research on that particular group.
"Orchids
are a difficult and confusing taxonomic group," said Silvera, who joined
the lab of Norman Ellstrand, a professor of genetics at UC Riverside, in 2011.
"People who specialize in the Orchid Family usually spend years naming
different species based on DNA and morphology. Sometimes plants can look alike
morphologically, but DNA informs us that they are very different species, which
makes naming the species difficult."
Silvera
explained that because the Orchid Family is so large, there are many species
that have not been found before. As a result, new orchid species are being
named every year and the number is rising.
"The
diversity of orchids is best seen in the tropics, where, unfortunately, habitat
is being destroyed very fast," she said. "As a result, we are rapidly
losing the diversity of orchid species. Although there are many orchid species
unnamed in nature, it is actually quite difficult to determine for sure that an
orchid is unnamed. They are difficult to find and difficult to tell apart.
Orchid species are the raw materials for hybrids, and there is a lot to
discover about how these species evolved and became such a successful group.
Orchid research will only thrive if efforts to conserve tropical rainforest are
put in place."
The Orchid
Family contains the largest number of plant species in the world. They are the
most collected group of plants by hobbyists. Close to 30,000 known species
exist worldwide; many remain undiscovered. Panama alone has about 1,100 known
orchid species. The United States has about 200 known orchid species.
Orchids are
unique in that the flower's female and male reproductive parts are fused
together. An interesting aspect is that orchids can easily hybridize or cross.
As a result, some 300,000 orchid hybrids are human-made and commercially
available to the public. Not found in nature, they only occur in laboratories
and greenhouses for commercial purpose.
Currently, Lophiaris
silverarum is known to grow only in central Panama. It is not known if it
grows in other areas of Central America. The plant blooms only in November, the
flowers lasting about a month. It is not sold in the US because it is very rare
and it reproduces very slowly.
"We are
in the process of propagating the species in vitro in Panama for
commercial purposes," Silvera said. "My father, Gaspar Silvera, is
the owner of a small orchid company in Panama that specializes in propagating
native orchid species but because L. silverarum grows slowly, taking
about four years to reproduce in vitro, from seed to the first bloom, it
will take many years before it is available to the public in Panama first, and
then made commercially available outside of Panama."
Story
Source:
The above
story is based on materials
provided by University of
California - Riverside. The original article was written by Iqbal
Pittalwala. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal
Reference:
- GERMAN CARNEVALI, WILLIAM CETZAL-IX, RICARDO BALAM. A new species of mule-ear oncidium with straw-yellow flowers (Orchidaceae: Oncidiinae, Lophiaris) from central Panama. Phytotaxa, 2014; 162 (3): 165 DOI: 10.11646/phytotaxa.162.3.5
Cite This
Page:
University of California -
Riverside. "New orchid: 'Lophiaris silverarum' is known to grow only in
central Panama." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 17 April 2014.
<www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140417124710.htm>.