Demise of the Phrag. kovschii in habitat

[BillC]

I have some doubt about making this post because it makes painful reading, but I think it is important that we should know from a conservation aspect what has occurred with this plant. Pollenatrix Report : Dec.29 2003


Phrag. kovachii sites in Peru destroyed
In the December issue of Orchid Digest magazine, Harold Koopowitz wrote an interesting article about his visit to Peru. He and his companions had many adventures travelling through rough terrain to document and photograph a recently discovered patch of Phragmipedium kovachii, deep in the jungle.

Now comes news from a Peruvian grower that this patch, as with three other locations discovered earlier, has been stripped bare of these magnificent orchids:
"I happened to return to my hotel at lunch time with my friend, Manuel Camacho who is a local orchid enthusiast and guide to the Phragmipedium kovachii sites. We noticed a double cabin pick truck in the door of the hotel. What we saw in this pickup shocked us both and we could not believe what we were seeing!

There were 7 large rice and coffee sacks stuffed full with several hundred of the largest P. kovachii that we have ever seen with leaves fully 2-3 feet long sticking out the tops of the sacks with no attempt to hide them. "

"In early September, a friend of mine went to the site which Koopowitz visited & photographed only to find it totally wiped out including all visible seedling except for two plants that they saw very high up out of reach on the cliff which is the only reason they are still there. They took photographs of this site as it is today which I am forwarding to Koopowitz for the record. We know who did the deed because he sold several hundred to an Ecuadorian dealer and others to a dealer in Lima. He offered 200 to me which I turned down. "

It appears to be a case of ' Money is the root of all evil ' Bill

[Tobi]

UNBELIEVABLE!!!
What a shame something so beautiful is destroyed because of greed for money. I only wish there was some ways these natural areas could be guarded to prevent this from happening

[fred]

it is a shame as to what some people will do for the mighty dollar.

greed and stupidity

[tom499]

And treating the stolen orchids in such a way, many will be dead before they reach the selling market...

[Sharyn]

Bill: Thanks for sharing this. I saw your previous link on the Kovachii and I checked out the pics and thought, what a truly magnificent orchid. It's tragic that "poachers" ruin such wonders of the world - just like those who kill the elephants for ivory, or the beautiful tigers to make up health potions.

[janet_a]

*please* tell me someone has stem propped the species plants? the peruvian gov't maybe?

[BillC]

Janet, you will find that Green Canyon Orchids Laboratories will supply in-vitro flasks of PK as will http://www.pipingrockorchids.com/gallery/gallery8.htm. Green Canyon is in Canada, and Piping Rock is US. Bill

[janet_a]

well, at least they can survive in captivity...

[palito]

the ironic thing is that those plants had been growing there undisturbed next to towns and roads and nobody cared, even with those huge flowers, the local people didn't pluck them.

And there are already seedlings available in ecuador and peru. I don't know why they have to poach more material from the wild

[kmarch]

palito,

They "have" to poach material (read "choose" to poach material) from the wild because there are people who are willing to buy (and possibly illegally import) mature, collected plants. If there were no demand there'd be no supply. Personally I believe as hobbiests, collectors, growers, we should be extreemely wary of purchasing plants collected from the wild. There are controlled, responsible avenues for collecting plants and we should take great care when purchasing such plants to make sure the plants are legally and responsibly collected (which can be tough). Of course this isn't a problem with hybrids, but for those of us who like species, we always run the risk of being part of the reason people strip colonies of orchids from the wild.

So what can we do? We can:
1) Study orchid culture and be good growers - Doing this helps to ensure we're growing our plants well (possibly even propagating them) and not removing species from cultivation (e.g. killing plants).
2) Know where your plants are coming from - Are you buying species plants that have been propagated in nuseries? If you're buying collected plants, do you know if they've been legally and responsibly collected by reputable collectors?
3) Don't be afraid to ask lots of questions

[pikevi]

Yes, I remember reading some articles about what BillC has posted.

If one goes deeper into what happened there it is almost fictional!

The worse part was that the incident could not be reported to the authrorities for the following three weeks (or so), since the Gov't offices were closed for that long for New Year.

And the worst was that there was an official involved in the whole incidence, I believe.

Kmarch: Good advice. I only hope some of us get up to speed in breeding orchids.

[kmarch]

Janet,

Paphs and Phrags cannot be mericloned. I'm not sure why but mericloning techniques have not been successful with slippers. They can only be propagated by division or seed.

[Bolero]

Originally Posted by fred

it is a shame as to what some people will do for the mighty dollar.

greed and stupidity

Yes the person who first took them back to the USA illegally was very greedy and stupid. Everyone just following his lead.

[brookn]

It is all very sad, but this is not just happening to orchids. I see it all the time. When I first moved to Missouri, it was wild and untouched. Now all I see is development. Once people found out there was cheap land here, they moved here and topped off our hills, spoiled our water, and built KFC. I hope that the human race gets it soon. BTW our local orchids here that live in swamps are rapidly disappearing because of development.

[palito]

I looked around and I found some answers in the paper "Paphiopedilum cloning in vitro", published in Scientia Horticulturae in 2000.

The authors report that mericloning paphs is technically possible, but the current protocols are not viable from a commercial point of view. Most of the cultures succumb to fungal infections and the final production is too low. Also, specimens are too valuable to sacrifice them in big numbers to do proper research.

They described a new faster procedure to mericlone paphs. They used seedlings grown in sterile conditions as the starting material to avoid infections. They reported producing 12 new plants every 12 weeks or 100 plants per year per culture.

The plants they cloned are:
P. philippinense x P. Susan Booth
P. bellatulum 'Big spot' x P. Jo An's Wine
P. micranthum x P. glaucophyllum

[kmarch]

palito

Interesting...maybe some day we'll see it.

But, I must point out though that cloning is not a magic problem solver. there are two drawbacks with it with respect to it being a conservation solution:
1) clonal offspring carry the same gene pool the parents had - if all we do is clone, we're constantly reducing the size of the gene pool
2) genetic degradation or drift occurs when clones are made of clones - We've seen this with Cycnoces Wine Delight. Originally it was a very dark, maroon-wine colour. Later mericlones of it are almost red. Repeated cloning has caused the dark colour to degrade.

For these reasons I do not believe cloning is a useful conservation tool. A useful commercial horticultural tool? Definitely, but conservation (not collecting, protecting, etc., etc.) and breeding, I believe are better suited to preserving orchid species.

[pikevi]

Bolero, I am not saying that Americans are NOT greedy

But , if I remember, correctly, the Peruvian Govt. approached Americans to help propagate the Pk. And That is how it got into N.America.

I hope kmarch can tell us more on that.

kmarch: I think cloning is supposed to have identical DNA/RNA/mRNA and hence , theoretically, there is NO effect in gene pool.There could be,of course, accidental loss of parts of DNA which may determine the survival of the clone.
The possible weakening is perhaps due to telomeres(ends of DNA strands) being lost ( a pre-programmed processs that is believed to causes aging) as the cloning is done repeatedly.

Cross-breeding and hybridization with limited plants from a small area(s), on the other hand, may weaken the gene pool, purely because of the nature's way of conducting 'meiosis'.

I hope I am correct in assuming the same in plants , as well.

[kmarch]

pikevi,

In orchid taxonomy one of the perameters by which a species is defined is its containment as a breeding group, in other words that it does not breed with any thing other than itself. In the case of something with a severly limited geography, like Paph rothschildianum, this gene pool in the wild would be comparatively small to begin with. Yet even in a comparitively small gene pool, wouldn't the species as a whole be hardier and more likely to continue if the genes were continually beign reshuffled as opposed to being static as would be the case with cloning? If one specimen in the wild were susceptible to a fungus (for the sake of argument), and that one specimen were cloned as the rest of the population became extinct, wouldn't the entire species then be at higher risk because now the entire species is susceptible to that fungus?

We're dancing with the limits of my knowledge here. i'm afraid i don't know much about population genetics.