Encyclia androsiana

From the flood of the negative news on radio and other media, if I put my emotion aside, we are probably living in an interesting time. It makes me re-think about many things; mostly, nature of the human and their societies.  Xenophobia is relatively easy to understand from a biological view, since many people have instinct for familiarity, and that kind of fear may have helped them to survive the early stage of evolution.  But with the accumulated knowledge, I do not see the need to regress that far.  I never felt that history, sociology, economy, and politics to be interesting before 2016.  Things I have a hard time understanding is why the societal class lower than the super rich support the ideas against the redistribution of wealth.  The income tax is one of the methods and I would think that it is one of the mechanism to balance against the capitalism's tendency that money collects more money.  Well, I learned this kind of basic stuff in the junior high school, but by looking at this Wikipedia article, I'm sure there are more depths to the topic.  Also, I'm thinking that it would be cool to learn about the history more.  It is not quite same, but I would like to learn something from the history of The French Revolution, for example. I tried to learn about it when I was an undergrad student, but I may be able to understand more in light of the recent political division (well, it might be irrelevant).  Or it would be interesting to learn the history of how dictators arose.  I wish I had a little extra time... When we look at the positive side of recent events, seeing the ugly side of the society made me curious about seemingly boring topics.  I wish I had encountered a wonderful history teacher to open my eyes.  The current events made me confirm the importance of education (especially for the proper function of democracy). Speaking of education, I do not understand the short-sightedness of the newly elected Alaska governor.  Do any people really want to discourage the intellectual growth of our kids, our future, by cutting 30-40% of education budget?

Going back to the topic of orchids, when the flowers of this species opened, I could sense it even before I opened the zipper of the grow tent.  Sweet, pleasant fragrance, emitted from the small plant, was filling the area.  I don't grow too many Encyclia, but I tried this species (which was sold to me as E. unaensis from Ecuagenera) because it was supposed to be compact.  It is a little bigger than E. unaensis, but it is still relatively compact, and the height of the planti s about 25cm.  But miss-identification of the plant offered me an oppotunity to learn about this group.  Previously, I used to think that there were bunch of brown/green Encyclia which look a-like, and I never opened the relevant section in books/literature.

Encyclia androsiana is a recently described species (Sauleda, 2012).   He discovered the species in 1976 during his master's thesis but described it later after careful study of the literature.  The species epithet is derived from the place where it was originally found from the northern tip of District of South Andros, Andros Island, Bahama.  He encountered another population in the same region in 1979.  However, he noted that  trees of the type locality were cut down by late 1980's, and he did not find this species in the original population.  This species seems to be narrowly endemic, but exact distribution is not known  (Freid 2014). The elevation range wasn't given, but it is probably close to the sea level.

From a quick look, the flowers look similar to E. tampensis (see the next photo), which occurs sympatrically.  You can see the difference in the side lobe of the lip.  The side lobes of E. tampensis wrap around the column more tightly and the tips of the side lobes are more pointy when you flatten the lip.  The side lobe of E. androsiana is more open, and you can easily see the column.  Also the tip is more rounded.  The original description paper contains clear photos to show this point (link below in the literature cited section).

Encyclia tampensis by Malcolm Manners, released under CC-BY-2.0. The difference is subtle without a careful examination.

It also looks like E. unaensis, which is also an narrow endemic, but from Brazil.  Indeed, I obtained my plant as E. unaensis from Ecuagenera in spring 2017.  There are a couple differences you can observe:

1. The easiest distinction is that when you open up the lip, you can see the purple coloring at the base of lip, and purple colored veins goes up at the base of the side lobe.  E. unaensis has the purple spot in the middle lobe, but the base of the lip is white.
2. The round midlobe of the lip stays relatively flat with E. androsiana, but that of E. unaensis tends to recurve back.
3. The top side of the column has purplish spots toward the base, but E. unaensis has completely white column.
4. The base of the petal seems to be narrower in E. unaensis.  
5. When you remove and flatten the lip, you can also see the subtle difference in the shape of the side lobes.

Disected flower of E. androsiana. The green ruler on the left is metric, so each tick is one milimeter.  It was an old flower, so it had spots on the petals and sepals.

Lip of E. androsiana. Compare to the lip of E. uncinata below, in addition to the difference in the color at the base of the lip, the shape is quite different.

Column of E. androsiana from the top.  The purple stripes/spots are not seen with E. uncinata.

Profile view of the column of E. androsiana.  When you compare the illustration of E. uncinata below, you notice that both top and bottom sides aren't as curvy as E. uncinata.

Bottom side of the column of E. androsiana. Notice that the tip of the triangular opening of the stigma doesn't stretch toward the base.  Compare with the illustration of E. uncinata below.

Below I'm including how true E. unaensis looks like. The first two photos are from Fowlie (1991), the other two illustrations are from Bastos et al. (2016).  All other my images (non-human subject) are free to use under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence (CC-BY-SA 4.0).  But please don't copy the following four images.  They are copyrighted, but I'm justifying it under Educational Fair Use.

Note the petals, narrow at the base and recurved midlobe of the lip.

There is no purple color other than the midlobe.

The triangle stigma opening goes deeper toward the base.  With E. androsiana, the tip of the triangle stops around the place where the side flaps are attached.  Also if you compare the profile of the column.  E. uncinata has more pronounced S-shaped curve on the dorsal (top) side.

Literature Cited:

• Bastos, C. A., T. E. C. Meneguzzo, & C. van den Berg, 2016. Flora de Bahia: Encyclia (Orchidaceae). SITIENTIBUS série Ciências Biológicas, 16: 1-18.
• Fowlie, J. A. (1991). A new Encyclia species from the floodplains of Una (Bahia), Encyclia unaensis Fowl., sp. nov. The Orchid digest 55(1): 26-27.
• Freid, E., J. Francisco-Ortega, and B. Jestrow, 2014. Endemic seed plants in the Bahamian archipelago. The Botanical Review, 80(3): 204-230.
• Sauleda, R. P. 2012 A New Species of Encyclia Hooker From the Bahamas Islands. New World Orchidaceae -- Nomenclatural Notes, issue 2. (link-1, link-2 to PDF)