A Different Way To Protect The Ghost Orchid

[calvin_orchidL]

I don't have any extensive training in evolutionary biology, so rather than make assertions I can't fully back up, I thought I'd take a step back and pose some questions regarding the proposal at hand, trying to keep things in line with this discussion. Ignoring the man-made philosophical (and emotionally charged) concepts of purity, 'natural', true wilderness etc...and looking completely at the potential interventions that we take as humans impacting (whether positively or negatively) our environment:

1) What is the goal of this intervention? I think I'm still not clear regarding this, so if someone can clarify that would be great! There's a lot of talk about biodiversity, extinction etc...but what exactly are we trying to accomplish? Are we trying to save D. lindenii as we know it today? Or save some version of it that contains it's genes? Or just increase biodiversity on a whole, not worrying about what is present at the other end?

2) Does the intervention have potential for harm?
Is it even a remote possibility that the intervention causes side effects that end up going against the goal above? I made the assumption that the goal was to save d. lindenii as we know it today, and supplied evidence towards the threat hybrids might have towards existing species, but perhaps this was a false assumption altogether, and we're not trying to accomplish this goal.

3) Can this intervention be carried out without the above harmful effects? E.g. Can we achieve the same goal (assuming we have clarified what it is) without the potential harms listed above? For instance, if we are trying to preserve D. lindenii genetic material, can't everything that's been discussed (e.g. crossing with d. funalis and breeding for temperature tolerance, drought tolerance etc...) be done in a controlled greenhouse? Must it be introduced into the environment to achieve the same goal?

3) Are there other interventions that may be equally as effective in achieving the goal without potential harm? Some people have brought up conserving habitat, and others introducing lab strains into the environment. Other ideas might be to actually select for more tolerant, stronger d. lindenii clones in the controlled environment, and repopulate with these. Are these interventions more economical? Effective?

4) Is there a problem in need for intervention in the first place? Andrew brought this up which I guess brings us back to number 1 - what are we trying to solve? Is the problem loss of biodiversity in general? Is it extinction of d. lindenii specifically? Is it loss of the hawk moths?

[tropterrarium]

Hi Nat,

My main points are:
- Humans usually mess things up when interfering with nature.
- Biodiversity, with no further qualifier, refers to number of species. [there are other approaches, but don't want to digress].
- Hybrids with emergent properties is a red herring, particularly when looking at orchids. In the vast majority of cases you have either expression of character state of one parent (dominant/recessive system), or something in between (additive effects). Novel character states are extremely rare (see also saltational evolution and "hopeful monster" theory).
- Creating biodiversity has to do with creating species; n.b. "species" is a loaded term in itself, as it depends on species concepts, of which there are a good handful. That is why I went a bit into anagenesis/cladogenesis.
- In the thread that I only skimmed (not read every last post), I noted that the biodiversity-species-speciation connection was not made. So I wanted to provide a few keywords that the interested reader can further investigate. I have no intention of teaching pop-gen/evolution on this forum; have done it before as an upper division class. Pick up some general evolution book, such as Futuyma or Freeman & Herron. That will help putting all those trees together into a picture of a forest.
- Age & timing of species/speciation is on the order of million years based on orchid phylogenies using molecular clocks (take your pick). Conservation is typically a matter of a human generation (or less). There is a genuine time scale miss-match.
- Un-conventional content gets published in higher ranking journals (higher IF). Those journals also publish more non-sense (cold fusion, monoplacophorans are desegmented polyplacophora in PNAS, debunked as lab contamination at Harvard in MPE, etc.). Science publishing is not quite as neutral ivory-tower as non-scientist may think.

Glad you want to look at my pubs. See
http://www.vetigastropoda.com/abstra.../scipapers.php
Mainly molluscan systematics (including 4 books), some molecular phylogenetics, some phylogenetic theory, some paleo.
The CV tabs gives you history of professional appointments, and various editorial positions, and some conservation creds (member IUCN specialist group: that's one you only get by invitation). Also a list with 9 of the 10 taxa named after me (Pseudopusula geigeri is still missing, have to update the page).

So yes, I have a bit of an idea of what I talk about.

I am not interested in getting into the nitty gritty detail of Florida ghost orchid. In the infamous words of Bob Beeze, former curator of herpetology at LACM: "This is fascinating, but not fascinating enough for me to do anything about it".

I won't add anything more to this thread. That's as far as it goes. Back to working on SEMs of Oberonia. Peace!

[epiphyte78]

If I had to pick one introduction that could potentially have the greatest positive impact on biodiversity...then I think that I'd have to go with introducing hummingbirds to the rest of the world. Because I'm pretty sure that we all benefit when there's more, rather than less, pollinators. But I could be wrong. And to be clear, in no way shape or form am I advocating or supporting the illegal introduction of any plant or animal. I guess it's impossible for me to say that enough.

Here's my reply to tropterrarium...herclivation. Hopefully it contains information that everybody interested in the topic will find informative. Especially the part about paging versus scrolling.

Orchid Whisperer, gnathaniel...your last posts were definitely worthy of blog entries.

calvin_orchidL, good questions.

1. For me the goal is greater biodiversity.

2. For the most part, hedging bets is a pretty good strategy for minimizing harm. Given that I'm advocating that we hedge our bets, you're basically asking what's the potential harm of hedging our bets. In other words, you're asking what's the potential harm of trying to minimize potential harm.

3. Can we accomplish the same goal in cultivation? I don't think we can duplicate natural selection and adapative radiation in cultivation.

4. Hmmm...introduce a fitter lindenii? Well, it's not much of a hedge. Not sure if you heard of it, but there's a million orchid project in Florida. Basically they grow a bunch of native epiphytic orchids from seed and then attach them to street trees. It's pretty great. But imagine if the one million orchids were all clones of the same exact orchid. Even if the clone was wonderful...it would still be only one combination of traits. In essence it would be putting a lot of eggs in one basket. You could even put more eggs in one basket by putting all million orchids in one neighborhood. If that neighborhood was devastated by a hurricane or extreme cold then that would be it. Increasing variety/difference of traits/locations would increase the chances of success.

5. The immediate problem that we'd be trying to solve is that lindenii might have too much sameness/uniformity to handle the significant changes to its environment.


orchidsarefun, not sure about a timeline. I mean, there's no timeline if there isn't substantial expert support for herclivation of Dendrophylax. And I'm not even sure if the experts would agree about translocation of closely related species to Florida.

Well...if I missed anything then hopefully my blog entry covered it. If not then feel free to bring them up again.

[isurus79]

Originally Posted by orchidsarefun

Isurus79 Just don't post. Its not mandatory.
Others have made thoughtful comments and I have yet to read Epiphyte's replies to them. I hope he hasn't given up and moved on to another forum.

While I can imagine you'd love it if people who have dissenting opinions didn't speak up, IMO silence from people who know what they are talking about is tantamount to agreeing with those who know not what they speak. Don't tell me to shut up. It won't work.

And like I said before, I haven't called anyone "names." Your accusal that I am not playing by "adult rules" is far more insulting than anything I've said.

Originally Posted by orchidsarefun

On a macro level I also think that novel/far-fetched/out-of-the-box ideas have to be seriously considered as potential solutions to some of the problems facing conservation.

Not really, conservation biology has some relatively simple concepts that work VERY well. More specifically, preserving intact habitat and restoring degraded habitat is probably the most straight forward approach that works time and time again.

Originally Posted by orchidsarefun

I recently was part of a conversation on phal species where it was commented that current species are inferior to those found 50 years ago and the proposed solution was to backcross using older hybrids to try and re-obtain an original species.

You can't create a species by backcrossing hybrids. It doesn't work that way.

Originally Posted by orchidsarefun

Everyone can have an opinion and it doesn't have to make sense all the time.

This is not how science works. At all.


Its comments like these that are truly maddening to me and are the reason I can't just sit on the sidelines while people who don't know any better read this stuff and think this is how the world works. I'm also a biologist (though I don't have a PhD) and its incredibly frustrating that in the age of information, anyone can post this type of nonsense and people will accept it as fact. Epiphyte constantly talks about his blog that he claims attempts to relate to scientific hypotheses and yet he clearly has ZERO knowledge of the topic.

---------- Post added at 11:02 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:58 PM ----------

Originally Posted by epiphyte78

If I had to pick one introduction that could potentially have the greatest positive impact on biodiversity...then I think that I'd have to go with introducing hummingbirds to the rest of the world. Because I'm pretty sure that we all benefit when there's more, rather than less, pollinators. But I could be wrong. And to be clear, in no way shape or form am I advocating or supporting the illegal introduction of any plant or animal. I guess it's impossible for me to say that enough.

Here's my reply to tropterrarium...herclivation. Hopefully it contains information that everybody interested in the topic will find informative. Especially the part about paging versus scrolling.

Orchid Whisperer, gnathaniel...your last posts were definitely worthy of blog entries.

calvin_orchidL, good questions.

1. For me the goal is greater biodiversity.

2. For the most part, hedging bets is a pretty good strategy for minimizing harm. Given that I'm advocating that we hedge our bets, you're basically asking what's the potential harm of hedging our bets. In other words, you're asking what's the potential harm of trying to minimize potential harm.

3. Can we accomplish the same goal in cultivation? I don't think we can duplicate natural selection and adapative radiation in cultivation.

4. Hmmm...introduce a fitter lindenii? Well, it's not much of a hedge. Not sure if you heard of it, but there's a million orchid project in Florida. Basically they grow a bunch of native epiphytic orchids from seed and then attach them to street trees. It's pretty great. But imagine if the one million orchids were all clones of the same exact orchid. Even if the clone was wonderful...it would still be only one combination of traits. In essence it would be putting a lot of eggs in one basket. You could even put more eggs in one basket by putting all million orchids in one neighborhood. If that neighborhood was devastated by a hurricane or extreme cold then that would be it. Increasing variety/difference of traits/locations would increase the chances of success.

5. The immediate problem that we'd be trying to solve is that lindenii might have too much sameness/uniformity to handle the significant changes to its environment.


orchidsarefun, not sure about a timeline. I mean, there's no timeline if there isn't substantial expert support for herclivation of Dendrophylax. And I'm not even sure if the experts would agree about transolation of closely related species to Florida.

Well...if I missed anything then hopefully my blog entry covered it. If not then feel free to bring them up again.

Case and point. After all this, Epiphyte still thinks his original premise has merit! Not only that, but that spreading hummingbirds throughout the planet will somehow benefit the world!!

Mods, please shut this thread down. While the majority of posts here are very much in line with reality, the ignorance being posted here by a few members is making OB look bad. Very, very bad.

[Orchid Whisperer]

Steve, reading the post you quoted, I agree it is time for this to end, at least for my part. In the text you quote, epiphyte78 manages to say nothing at all, yet requires 5 numbered sections to do so! I don't feel the need to censor and end the thread, but that is up to the moderators.

To add to all the misinformed and misguided drivel posted about D. lindenii, now epiphyte78 seems to be moving the subject to hummingbirds and introducing them to the rest of the world!! Unbelievable!! Not to mention that if it we're done the poor birds would starve because the plants they feed on are all in the Americas.

The text you quote also includes two words apparently invented by epiphyte78 (herclivation and transolation) which have absolutely no meaning to anyone except epiphyte78. But I will admit that in this regard, epiphyte78 has inspired me. I have decided to create my own made-up word. The word is bloefleuvinate. It is pronounced blo-FLOO-vih-nate. It is a verb which means to actively avoid reading about incoherent, half-baked and misguided ideas promoted by the chronically and unrepentantly uninformed.

It is time for me to bloefleuvinate. Indeed, I have been procrastinating with respect to my bloefleuvinating. As I depart, I would like to share with everyone the ancient saying (which I just invented): "Birds of a feather, bloefleuvinate together".

Happy bloefleuvinating everyone.

[Subrosa]

In regards to respect, I would contend that granting any level of respect to the ideas postulated by the op only encourages more of the same from him. A bad idea is a bad idea, and respecting it is an insult to good ideas. As far as respect for the person behind the bad idea, as a person he is indeed entitled to a fundamental level of respect. But what exactly is the fundamental level of respect to which all are deserving of? Does it include not calling a person's crazy ideas crazy? Not in my book. As far as I'm concerned the only guarantees of respect a person earns by the mere act of breathing are to not have one's person or property laid hands upon without permission. The stroking of a person's feelings is the job of their loved ones, not those who disagree with him/her.

[jcec1]

I can see a fundamental error in releasing a hybrid into the wild. It is known that hybrids do not come true, so if this hybrid does sexually reproduce in the wild, then progeny with unknown characteristics will then be in the wild. So whilst the initial hybrid may be innocuous there is know way of knowing what traits subsequent generations will have. Many other introductions have been species which can be very destructive, but at least have 'stable' and known characteristics.

[epiphyte78]

isurus79 and Subrosa, I've admitted over and over that I might be wrong. I'm human, I'm fallible, I make mistakes...I'm a blind man only feeling one part of an elephant. But just telling me that I'm wrong over and over in different ways isn't helpful to myself or anybody else interested in actually learning about evolution, biology, conservation and orchids. What's helpful is if you actually cite some relevant sources that refute my own sources. Of course, this does require more work than simply saying that I'm wrong in different ways.

In my latest blog entry (here it is in case you missed it...Herclivation), I've cited numerous high quality sources that I believe support my theory. If you're capable of refuting those sources, then please go ahead and do so. If you're incapable of refuting them, or too lazy to bother even trying to refute them, then your perspective on the topic has been duly noted. Thanks for your contribution.

But given the fact that neither of you think the topic is important enough create even one blog entry for...I don't think either of you are here because you're genuinely concerned about Dendrophylax or even conservation in general. But then again, I could be wrong. Perhaps you've started some threads in the past on the topic of conservation? If so, I'd certainly be interested to see them.

Originally Posted by Orchid Whisperer

To add to all the misinformed and misguided drivel posted about D. lindenii, now epiphyte78 seems to be moving the subject to hummingbirds and introducing them to the rest of the world!! Unbelievable!! Not to mention that if it we're done the poor birds would starve because the plants they feed on are all in the Americas.

What percentage of the plants in Southern California that hummingbirds regularly visit are natives?

Originally Posted by Orchid Whisperer

The text you quote also includes two words apparently invented by epiphyte78 (herclivation and transolation) which have absolutely no meaning to anyone except epiphyte78. But I will admit that in this regard, epiphyte78 has inspired me. I have decided to create my own made-up word. The word is bloefleuvinate. It is pronounced blo-FLOO-vih-nate. It is a verb which means to actively avoid reading about incoherent, half-baked and misguided ideas promoted by the chronically and unrepentantly uninformed.

All words were invented by somebody. My theory doesn't have a word for it, that I know of, so I took the liberty of giving it one. Not unlike taking the liberty of naming a new hybrid. Now, instead of having to say "a theory that considers the possibility of facilitating the adaptive radiation of epiphytic orchids via translocation and/or hybridization"...I can simply say "herclivation". That's pretty convenient. Language, and even math, is great like that.

And yeah, I meant to type "translocation" rather than "transolation". Sorry about that. I guess you didn't get a chance to look at any of the sources that gnathaniel linked to in his very first post in this thread. Well...better late than never.

[Subrosa]

My last post wasn't unintended to point out your mistakes, and didn't. It was intended to discuss how others should deal with your mistakes, as that is a topic which has been brought up, and for which there is actually room for serious debate.

[isurus79]

Originally Posted by epiphyte78

isurus79 and Subrosa, I've admitted over and over that I might be wrong. I'm human, I'm fallible, I make mistakes...I'm a blind man only feeling one part of an elephant. But just telling me that I'm wrong over and over in different ways isn't helpful to myself or anybody else interested in actually learning about evolution, biology, conservation and orchids. What's helpful is if you actually cite some relevant sources that refute my own sources. Of course, this does require more work than simply saying that I'm wrong in different ways.

In my latest blog entry (here it is in case you missed it...Herclivation), I've cited numerous high quality sources that I believe support my theory. If you're capable of refuting those sources, then please go ahead and do so. If you're incapable of refuting them, or too lazy to bother even trying to refute them, then your perspective on the topic has been duly noted. Thanks for your contribution.

But given the fact that neither of you think the topic is important enough create even one blog entry for...I don't think either of you are here because you're genuinely concerned about Dendrophylax or even conservation in general. But then again, I could be wrong. Perhaps you've started some threads in the past on the topic of conservation? If so, I'd certainly be interested to see them.




What percentage of the plants in Southern California that hummingbirds regularly visit are natives?



All words were invented by somebody. My theory doesn't have a word for it, that I know of, so I took the liberty of giving it one. Not unlike taking the liberty of naming a new hybrid. Now, instead of having to say "a theory that considers the possibility of facilitating the adaptive radiation of epiphytic orchids via translocation and/or hybridization"...I can simply say "herclivation". That's pretty convenient. Language, and even math, is great like that.

And yeah, I meant to type "translocation" rather than "transolation". Sorry about that. I guess you didn't get a chance to look at any of the sources that gnathaniel linked to in his very first post in this thread. Well...better late than never.

If you really want to learn more (and I think you do), please take some conservation or biology classes at a local community college. I think you'd a) really enjoy them and; b) your ideas would benefit greatly from a more thorough understanding of basic biology. I don't have the time or energy to address every point you've made and I certainly don't have the time to make a blog. OB comments are as close to having a blog as I'd care to deal with. I'm also done with this thread. I'm out.