Paph callosum v sublaeve

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Presentation is good for most callosums for the exception of the slight kink in the dorsal. Update to follow after maturity.
 
a beautiful flower , indeed.
How do you know its sublaeve?
I looked again at Averyanows article on Vietnamese forms and some earlier discussions in this forum and got totally confused.
Soon my first potentianums are opening and I will compare them to normal? callosums.
 
The plant was bought as sublaeve and I believe i got this one from FrankRC. I use to have a std callosum v. callosum. They tend to be larger in all aspects with wavy dorsals. The typical callosum's dorsal would even have a bad twist to the dorsal. The smaller plants which have had many names over the years tend to have tamer dorsals or tailored as it maybe looked at.
 
Now thats the million dollar question! There are several ways to look at the barbatum group. Two popular ways are; its one species with a massive land coverage where some look like the type barbatum and others are callosum sublaeve at their extreme or they started out as two separate species, barbatum and callosum expanded their area of occupation and have inter-bred so much so its hard to tell apart with many intermediates. I favor the two species growing into each other myself.
 
Both may be occurring at the same time...

I think they diverge from the same ancestor (eg callosum) to different ecocline species (eg barbatum) vary by adaptation to environment and pollinators.

Then over time as they overlap territories, they swarm to produce intermediaries (eg sublaeve) that may stabilize to speciation and eventually new forms appear (eg potentianum).

A theory that can only be elucidated more clearly with ancestor.com for orchids lol.
 
This phenomenon is common among many plants and animals not just orchids of course. Back in the days when barbatum was described travel was tough, shipping was slow and cultural requirements where poorly understood. Time worked against collectors. They had it ruff getting into the woods/ jungles, collect whole colonies, bag them up and get the plants back to a ship. Sail for months back to hot houses where many more plants would die. If lucky the men whom described these new species saw one blooming plant and that was the "type" for the species. Repeat this scenario from a different colony and the man describing says, this is a different flower. New species!
Vendors of the day could compound the issue with a slightly different flower , advertise as new and sell out! It was all about making money.

Now back to sublaeve. I took a downward shot of the dorsal to show the wave. This shaping of the dorsal fits well with callosum var callosum. 20210228_091853.jpg
 

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