Mericloning Paphs

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smartie2000 said:
Wouldn't just flasking the seeds of the rare plants saturate the markets same rate as mericloning anyways?
Do mericloned plants usually bloom eariler out of flask? I wouldn't think so, but I might be wrong. Cloning is not as economical in "saving the species from extinction" as just flasking seeds

So far flasking doesnt seem to have satisfied the market since collection (or salvage) of wild plants still seems to be a common practice. Also there are 2 steps in the natural propagation method (namely flowering and germination) not needed for cloning as far as I am aware of. So bypassing those two steps can save you a year or two. And if slipper cloning becomes as easy as phal cloning you can ensure much higher production rates than traditional seed germination rates.

Who's to say what the future will hold, but I think it may end up the way as the phal market.
 
I like being able to obtain top quality plants at low prices. For example, the inexpensive catt and oncidium alliance clones. In some of these cases many of the plants of a grex are hum drum or outright dogs.

On the other hand if we had widespead paph cloning would we have the amazing range of new roth and besseae F2s, F3s, etc.? Not to mention the amazing things going on in the world of maudiae types?

Just my $0.02.
gary
 
Although Home Depot used to carry Paphs, I dont think they ever caught on because most people probably couldnt keep them alive. Where I live I can pick Phals out of the garbage and salvage them. Once the flowers are gone a lot of people aren't interested in having the big leaf things around. For sure if Paps and Phrags were massed produced the producers would make a great profit but the hybridizers would still have to make new crosses to add variety. And of course there is the conservation aspect...
 
This isn't the first mericloned paph, I'm afraid. A nice marketing gimmick though. Mericloning of paphs has been possible for at least 15 years. It almost never works, and it involves destruction of a growing point on a valuable plant (if it wasn't valuable, it wouldn't be worth cloning). I'm pretty sure there is a chapter in Arditti's book on orchid micropropagation (said book being at least 15 years old). I'd have to go to the library to get you chapter and verse.

The main holdback on mericloning paphs, as far as I know, was that the explants almost always are contaminated no matter how much you try to sterilize them. But the success rate is very low, regardless. It probably won't be a common procedure. You can stem-prop some paphs, too. Or at least it has been done, I haven't done it myself.
 

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