Bulbophyllum purpurascens (Long Leafed VS Round Leafed)

[venus5026]

the round leafed var. having bigger size flowers with wider, longer & curved sepals

[venus5026]

[raybark]

Great observation, Venus!

The scientist in me makes me wonder:

• Is this just part of natural variation? The comparison of just two plants is not much to go on.
• If we had 1000 of them, would the parallel hold true?
• If it does, might they be truly different varieties of the same species, or possibly different, but similar species. That happens a lot in the orchid world.
• The lip/staminode structure is often used to discern different species. In your photos, they are quite similar, but the one seems to have something of a slight bifurcation, but that might just be due to differences in the photo shoot angle.

[PaphMadMan]

Great observation, Venus!

The scientist in me makes me wonder:

• Is this just part of natural variation? The comparison of just two plants is not much to go on.
• If we had 1000 of them, would the parallel hold true?
• If it does, might they be truly different varieties of the same species, or possibly different, but similar species. That happens a lot in the orchid world.
• The lip/staminode structure is often used to discern different species. In your photos, they are quite similar, but the one seems to have something of a slight bifurcation, but that might just be due to differences in the photo shoot angle.

With the one plant having larger flowers and being broader in both leaves and floral segments it makes me wonder if we're seeing examples of a diploid and a tetraploid. It really comes down to what natural populations of the species looks like. Is this representative of 2 separate populations, or a range of variation within a population, or discontinuous variation in a population, or one unusual selected plant and one that is typical for the species? Without knowing it is easy to speculate.

[raybark]

I had not considered the ploidy effect.

Great - another possibility we may never know.

[Sheryl]

Beautiful!

[Brutal_Dreamer]

This is really interesting. Thank you!!

cheers,
BD

[JDT]

Interesting had not realized that