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I hold that the original Star Trek series was still the best of all the Star Trek shows. In one very memorable episode, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” the Enterprise encounters the last two individuals from the planet Arianis. These two men are of different races: one is solid black on his left side and white on his right, while the other is the opposite. They are sworn enemies, and one has been chasing the other for 50,000 years. (!)

Here is one of the gentleman from planet Arianis:

And here is a Paph that must have come from the same planet (scroll down!):

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Notice the near perfect split down the middle of the flower, the stem, even the ovary (i.e., the seedpod thing)!

What genetic accident happened to produce this freak of nature? What can we learn? Can your plants avoid this awful fate?

That’s for another posting…

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(If you missed the first post about ploidy, click here.)

Does increasing ploidy actually work? Like many things in biology, the answer is yes and no.

Increasing ploidy is a kind of blunt-instrument way of jacking up the number of genes that do something desirable. For example, a normal diploid plant has two copies of, say, the gene that produces red flower pigmentation. By doubling ploidy (e.g., increasing the number of chromosomes from 2n to 4n), you’ll have double your original number of red pigmentation gene copies: you started with two, but now you have four.

The idea, then, is that you’ll get more red pigment produced.

Here’s a way of looking at it:

Imagine you are looking for a new flat screen TV at Best Buy or someplace like that. Imagine also that on one wall there are 50 TVs, each one set to a different channel, and to a different volume. Let’s say The Simpsons is playing on one of the TVs.

Let’s increase the “ploidy” of the TV showroom by DUPLICATING the wall of TVs, all with the same shows and same respective volumes. Now, there are 100 TVs, and 50 shows playing.

What you have now is a double dose of each show on each TV. You’ve got twice as much Simpsons blaring out at you as you had previously.

A similar thing happens when you increase ploidy — you increase the number of genes and what the genes make (called the “gene product” which is usually a protein).

So if you increased the number of genes involved in making red pigment by increasing the number of chromosomes, you are that much more likely to have redder flowers.

But, at the same time, you’re increasing the number of copies of all the other genes that do stuff in the plant, too. This may have a positive effect, a negative effect, or zero effect. Like so many things in biology, it all depends…

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At the WOC, some friends of mine exhibited a cattleya hybrid, Pot. Hey Song ‘Tian Mu’. It ended up winning a couple of best-of-breed type prizes. My friend showed me the winning plant; it was a lovely deep red, almost maroon, color. I asked him how much it cost. His answer: $100 for the prize-winning specimen, and $30 for identical clones. I was astounded at the price of this big champion — not at how pricey it was, but how inexpensive!

Now, if you were to walk a few feet away to look at the Krull-Smith exhibit, you would find individual specimens of P. rothschildianum, or P. lowii, or various multifloral hybrids in all their glory. Each of these plants would easily start at $2000. Some could probably fetch $4000 or more.

So why are slipper orchids so expensive?

In a word: cloning. Or rather, the inability to clone them at commercial scale (at this point).

The laboratory research required to discover how to clone paphs is still somewhat rudimentary. Cloning of Paphs has been done in the laboratory, and there have been isolated cases where a protocorm (a mass of undifferentiated but genetically identical plant cells) continues to spawn off new plantlets, but there don’t appear to be any large-scale commercial efforts going on.

When I first got into orchids, I sure did think about it, though. A lot. I read up a bunch of scientific papers by labs (mostly in Taiwan) that had done some research in the field. For the most part, the research was done on hybrids, not species, and but there seemed to me some issues with experimental design and interpretation.

In any case, in genera that can be easily cloned (e.g., Phalaenopsis, Cattleya) you can have hundreds of thousands of plants from a single test tube. That’s why a top plant with exceptional characteristics can be brought to mass market easily, quickly, and cheaply.

Doesn’t work that way with Paphs and Phrags, though. In addition to the difficulty of cloning them, they just grow so slow! So even if you could clone them, you’d have to expend a certain amount to grow them to size and the cost to carry them to bloom may not be recoverable at the market price of the plants. After all, in the fickle potted plant market, who knows what a non-orchid buyer would pay for a plant?

It all goes to reinforce the old orchid growers’ saying: “How do you make a million bucks in orchids? Start with two million.”

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Paphiness Orchids is sponsoring an auction to support SlipperTalk.com, a wonderful place to read about slipper orchids and interact with other orchid addicts. We’re auctioning off a copy of Paphiopedilum in Taiwan IV, the latest and best in this series, packed with pictures of beautiful slipper orchids.

Here are a couple scans from the book:

Other copies (non-auction) are available; please email orchids@paphinessorchids.com if you’re interested.

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