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Originally Posted by orchidman77
I agree with everyone above - drop it in a larger pot with chunky mix! It looks super happy with lots of good roots, so it should take off pretty quickly.
FYI - the spotting on your aclandiae seedling is completely natural, but it does indicate that it's probably not a coerulea (coerulea Cattleyas lack the "red" anthocyanin pigments). I believe that orchid breeders are having trouble getting a "reliable" coerulea variant of aclandiae, and many times coerulea parents are yielding inconsistent results. Sorry to burst that balloon, but it's still a wonderful species and I'm excited for you! I have an an aclandiae cross made with two alba parents, but the seedling isn't alba - the leaves are pigmented. It's about to bloom for the first time, and I'm excited to see how the flower will appear.
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Wait can anybody confirm this? I'm only passingly familiar with the specific genetics, but my understanding was that there's a number of different classes of 'coerulea' mutations to the anthocyanin pathways, and that each different type lacks certain specific anthocyanins.
What I've read basically suggests that any one given anthocyanin pigment might be purple, red, blue, black, etc, and whatever combination the variant has—say, neither A nor B, but indeed C, or some other combination that excludes the more 'red' anthocyanins—will determine if the perceived flower color 'looks like' a coerulea, regardless of its parentage.
I don't have any specific info on the genetics of the parents (I tried looking up their names online, and for whatever reason I didn't get any results), so it's definitely possible they have incompatible classes of anthocyanin mutations and 'filled in the gaps' enough in the genome that the daughter orchid would have the more typical magenta phenotype. In theory, though, it should also be possible for it to have some number of intact anthocyanin-related genes enough to spot the leaf on the new growth, but to still have a 'coerulea' flower phenotype.
If anyone else here knows more about pigment genetics then please do correct me though, cause I'd definitely rather be disappointed now than later when it hopefully finally flowers
---------- Post added at 02:12 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:05 PM ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dusty Ol' Man
Welcome to your new addiction. I wanted to keep my collection small (and it is compared to many others), but it soon went from 10 to 25! My wife just looks at me and shakes her head.
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Ahahahaha I definitely see things heading that way here too
I actually first got into growing orchids because they're my partner's favorite flower, and I wanted to have lots to keep in our room together. As luck would have it though, his favorite color is purple, but SPECIFICALLY blue-purple, and red-purple he doesn't so much care for. Go figure that those would happen to be some of the rarest plants. Theoretically I'm keeping the collection small for now while I'm living in an apartment, but we'll see how well I hold out haha
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