Orchidouxdingues

From what I saw in the islands that are the home to this complex of plants in the early 60s, there are no living plants of what was originally named as P. speciosa. A very elderly taxonomist with little comparative material pronounced C#1 to be a speciosa. Actually, the plant does not even come from within the range of the population originally named as P. speciosa. No other plant taxonomist that I know of believes that C #1 is anything other than P. tetraspis. The genetic abnormality that shows up as poor control of pigment placement is common in P. tetraspis from different areas of its current range. Having said all of that, I should also point out that the original name P. speciosa probably should be applied to all of this complex since I doubt that on the small islands they come from that there were two seperate species so closely related. Since so little material of P. speciosa was saved and no more exists within its home range, it is difficult to settle this. I suspect that if DNA material from preserved specimens was analyzed we would find that there is only really one species involved in this complex and the earlier name would then apply to it. So you can see that this is a complex problem to resolve. I do not believe that the pronouncement that C #1 is a P. speciosa really helped to resolve the problem and in fact just made it worse. It would be best at this time to call all of this group by the name P. tetraspis since all plants of the original population named P. speciosa are extinct and C #1 comes from an area far removed from the original source of P. speciosa.
Dean

D'après le site de Bernard Lagrelle sur le P. speciosa : cette espèce semblait éteinte mais quelques spècimens font peu à peu leur réapparition (http://pagesperso-orange.fr/bernard.lagrelle/Speciosa/Speciosa.html). Y-a-t-il quelqu'un qui pense avoir P. speciosa ?

En cherchant les messages postés sur le forum dans le passé, je m'aperçois que les speciosa qui ont été postés sont des C1, donc plutôt des tetrapsis.

Il semblerait que personne ne sache vraiment ce qu'est un vrai speciosa, et même existe-t-il encore...