Orchid Borealis

Taiga found a giant puddle.  Lots of rocks in convenient location. In the twenty-first century, who has guessed that people all over the world had to march for science ?  Even in the small town of Fairbanks, hundreds (or maybe thousands) of people showed up to Ryan Middle School, and we marched along the Airport Way.  The weather was nice with blue sky, and temperature was reaching to warm (for Alaskan) 10C (50F), thanks to the climate change.  We still have snow on the ground, but it has been melting and many good puddles where kids can jump in. The march went smoothly and peacefully without an incident, but there were small stone-throwing riots (the video clip at the end of this post).  Here are a couple photos from the scene. Many dogs were participating, too.  This lab was carrying a stick with a sign: "Stick up for science".  Some animals are definitely more reasonable than the Dumb Tard. "Labs for Science" Some kids liked this sign: "

I love the color of this flower!   Dendrobium vexillarius  is the most common species in Dendrobium section Oxyglossum  of New Guinea (Reeve and Woods 1989).  It can be found in Moluccas  (west of New Guinea), New Guinea , and  Bismarck Archipelago  (east of New Guinea) at the elevations of 1200-3500m.  While the availability of this species for cultivation is somewhat limited at this moment, it is a very popular species partly due to the amazing color palette of the species.  The species shows amazing variations in the color of flowers, and Reeve and Woods (1989) recognized 6 varieties.  The flower color includes blue, yellow, white, orange, pink/purple, and red.  These varieties represent distinct populations.  I surely hope that breeders will respect the wonder of natural variation, and try to preserve the varietal differences in cultivation. Description, distribution map and a key to varieties, derived from Reeve and Woods (1989), can be seen in Orchids of New Guinea site .

Dendrobium violaceum occurs in the island of  New Guinea .  Although it is one of the largest species within this group of Dendrobium section Oxyglossum , the height of the plant is less than 30cm, and mine is about 15-20cm.  Two subspecies are recognized; D. v. subsp.   violaceum and D. v. subsp. cyperifolium (Reeve and Woods 1989).   D. v. subsp. violaceum has leaves which are 2-11mm wide, and occurs throughout New Guinea (elevations of 750-2000m).   D. v. subsp. cyperifolium is recognized by its narrow leaves of 0.75-2mm wide, and it occurs mainly in the western and northern parts of the island (elevations of 1200-1850m).  You can see the distribution map of the two subspecies in this link . A side note  about Dendrobium section Oxyglossum : Dendrobium is one of the largest genera in Orchid family (Orchidaceae), and several sections were proposed within the genus in order to clarify the evolutionary relationship.  However, the traditional sections, based on mo

Muscarella megalops occurs in a relatively small area in south-western Ecuador in provinces of Azuay , El Oro and Loja  at elevations of around 1600-2600m (Parsons and Gerritsen, 2013).  In nature, it is a rare species (Luer 2006).  Fortunately, this fascinating miniature species is fairly available and popular in cultivation. The genus name of this species have been changed a couple times because the systematics of Pleurothallids has been revisited extensively in recent years.  This species was originally described as Pleurothallis in 1982 by Luer.  Subsequently, Pridgeon & Chase (2001) and Pridgeon (2005) placed it under Specklinia .  Luer (2006) proposed that it should be under Muscarella . A molecular phylogeny based on nrITS and matK clearly supports Luer's proposition (Karremans et al, 2016), and it shows that ramping  Muscarella  species into genus Specklinia is not a good idea (see the following figure of phylogeny). Karremans (2016) proposed nine major clade