PHRAG said:
I was thinking about this. With CITES regulations preventing the collection (or at least making it more subversive) of orchid species from the wild, does that mean that some species might possibly disappear from collections alltogether?
Yes.
Many hybrids certainly have disappeared over a short time. Without the influx of wild genetic stock in breeding programs most species will eventually be reduced to a state where they are no longer representative of wild plants or compatible with the wild habitat. They become genetically engineered species
Is that a bad thing and in which cases?
Is it bad if a specie disappears from collections? Some people may believe you should not have an orchid collection. To them it would be a good thing.
If you remove a specie from visibility it soon becomes unimportant to the human society as a whole. So in that case it is a bad thing.
I'll use wolves as an example. If photographers had not published so many beautiful photographs of captive (tame) wolves they would not be so popular today. The striking images inspired people to support reintroduction. Now wolves run wild in North America after "extinction".
Orchids (and other plants) play an important role in conservation. CITES lists them so they must be important. (figure of speech). But CITES does not conserve, people do. You asked (later in this thread) where you could donate money for orchid conservation.... You did not ask this because orchids are known to be going extinct. You asked because you like orchids, because you have a visible connection to them. If the person who first showed you an orchid had not had an orchid perhaps you would not be concerned about conserving them.
So is it bad if we loose one specie from the collective collections?
I say yes, what do you say?
Which species no longer appear in any sort of sustainable wild habitat and depend on human intervention to prevent them from extinction?
I bet no one really knows the answer to this.
Does line breeding change plants enough that re-introducing them into the wild would be a bad idea in the instance that someday a species faces extinction?
This question surely will get a lot of different opinions.
If your intention is to reintroduce a missing part of the natural world to recreate the original then the answer has to be yes. Line bred plants are not the same as naturally bred and evolved species. They are different, they will surely have different flowers. But I would imagine the original pollinators will pollinate them. Do they have the needed vigor to survive in a natural habitat? I doubt they do after extended selective breeding.
If you have plants in captive culture then the species is never really extinct is it? It may be extinct in nature but it still exists living in a different habitat (your windowsill).
So when you ask if line bred species are good or bad for preventing extinction you first must decide on what the point is. Do you just want to make sure there are red besseae along all mountain roads to mimic what was? Or do you want to preserve a failing specie for the sake of it? You can't stop specie extinction by planting line bred plants. But you can create a jump in natural selection and evolution. Maybe skips and jumps are the role of the hominids in evolution.
OK! :clap: