Why do people still collect?

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Aren't you contradicting Roth's notion that 99% of these collected plants will die without blooming?

Sorry, what I said refers to bulbos and other pseudobulbous species. I think roth refers to paph cases, exclusively. These establish very well just tied to a log and watered daily (even if completely leafless), provided the rhizome is not damaged.
 
Sorry, what I said refers to bulbos and other pseudobulbous species. I think roth refers to paph cases, exclusively. These establish very well just tied to a log and watered daily (even if completely leafless), provided the rhizome is not damaged.

Honestly it depends what.... I have seen a lot of bulbos from Irian Jaya that were on sale in Thailand, they will be dead within days, as they are cold growing. Some species never estaqblish ( though I agree pretty much everything on the photos is not that difficult), the coelogyne especially are extremely difficult to establish if they are not collected at the exact, proper time, and repotted right away. If you get them with a small new growth starting, they are gone, because the old roots will die, and the new growth will not root until it is way big. If you get them when the growth is big, and ready to root, the new growth is still soft and can rot in the bag. Most of those plants anyway will regress to seedling/small plant stage before eventually catching up...
 
Yes much the same as people who want wild caught tropical fish......there is some kind of prestige in having wild collected living things.

I don't understand it and most of us probably never will really comprehend the mentality behind it. The single most selfish thing I know of (worse than the GFC if you ask me).
 
Native North American species are smuggled (exported illegally) to other countries all the time and sold for big money. Just check what minnows from the bait shop sell fro in Germany...$50@.
Only imagine what an endangered Pup fish goes for.

Are you serious? I've never heard of this. People buy minnows as exotics? What's a Pup fish? Can you tell us more?
 
Are you serious? I've never heard of this. People buy minnows as exotics? What's a Pup fish? Can you tell us more?


There's a bunch of "pupfish" (related to kilifish / Fundulus) Genus Cyprinodon. Some are isolated to single sink holes in the desert southwest. Some have much wider ranges including brackish to saline conditions through out the South/ Southeast US and into the Caribbean Islands. Maybe extending up most of the Eastern seaboard. We actually use the most common species, Cyprinodon variagatus, in our lab to conduct salt water toxicity tests. They are very easy to culture in both fresh and salt water.

I don't know how many different species there are, but they are superficially similar. The biggest species may be about the size of a US quarter, and the smaller species maybe the size of a US nickel at maturity. Females are dull brown, Breeding males in various shades of metalic blue, green, and maybe some red and yellow highlights. You can actually transport the eggs in damp paper towels (no standing water) and hatch them out after several days without water.

One time I had a breeding group collected from Turks Caicos. They looked like pigmy versions of the common variagatus. I had them in 33 ppt salt water, but I needed the tank for something else, moved them out of the tank, filled it w/chlorinated tap water for a day, drained and filled with dechlorinated water for the next group of fish I was going to use the tank for.
Over the course of a week, I ended up with about 50 baby pupfish hatching from the gravel in the bottom of the tank! Tough buggers!

Any way some of the rarest are the isolated desert species (famous for heat tolerance). A population of Desert pupfish (Cyprinodon diablo) is found in Death Valley National Park. A couple of other endangered species are found in isolated sinkhole systems in Nevada, Arizona, and N Mexico. They tend to be on private ranch land in out of the way remote areas. I know at one time the Nature Conservancy had bought some cooperative easements around the sinkholes. Several public aquariums had started an SSP (Species Survival Program) with them to artificially propagate.

I was involved with a similar SSP for Lake Victorian Cichlids at the same time as other zoo/aquariums were working with the native species. The Lake Victorian Cichlid SSP produced so many fish (some of which extinct in the wild) we ended up dumping into the retail aquarium trade for maintaining tank space. I don't know if the other SSP's were equally successful since I have left the zoo biz.

I believe there there are still national and international Cichlid and Killifish associations. When I was active in aquaria the German's and Japanese were particularly interested in these fishes (not unlike orchids).

Killifish are really good for international trade since you can transport eggs in damp moss or paper towels. Most species live great at room temperature, in small tanks with no filtration.
 
Are you serious? I've never heard of this. People buy minnows as exotics? What's a Pup fish? Can you tell us more?

Yes serious.
Pup fish are defined above but I only used them as an example of any rare species.
Every Continent has unique endemic species and those species are "Exotic" to other Continents. Just like "we" like "Exotics" from foreign lands people from those places like our species which are exotic to them.

If you put simple bait minnows in an aquarium and look at them with the eyes of appreciation (as opposed to on a hook) they are beautiful creatures.

Fish, lizards, snakes, salamanders, birds, spiders, beetles, plants..... does not matter what, there are groups of people that have interest in collecting them.

Some people buy specimens for their collections and some people collect from nature. Is it right or wrong either way? My guess is that every member of Slippertalk would collect wild orchids if they grew commonly in all the forests and ditches.

What is more rare in actual population numbers Dandelions or Epidendriums? I bet Dandelions are under a much greater threat of extinction.

The original point I think of this thread was to question why people would need or want to collect wild plants. I still say it is because the want to, well actually "want" may not be the correct word. The Human species by design is a "harvester".... seek, find, collect, consume..... do it again and again and again and prosper as a Homo sapiens.
 
The point is that not everything people do is for money or to survive. Some collectors like to collect just because that is what they want to do. You might get pleasure from having orchids growing in your house and the other guy might get his from hunting and collecting plants in the forest.

So you're saying these collectors are just giving the plants away!? :rolleyes:
I dont think so. Yes I agree, our species is the consumer, unfortunately, sometimes at the cost of other entire species.
 
So you're saying these collectors are just giving the plants away!? :rolleyes:
I dont think so.

No I'm not saying the collectors are giving plants away. I'm saying they are choosing to collect the plants because "they want to". They may have many reasons why they want to. Maybe some only for the money but others because it is a way to make money doing something they enjoy. Maybe it is a family heritage? Maybe they like getting out in the wild away from the kids? Maybe they like the thrill of seeing how big a pile they can find?

The point is they have a choice and they choose to do it because they want to do it.

Yes I agree, our species is the consumer, unfortunately, sometimes at the cost of other entire species.

All species are consumers, we are not unique from that act. How we are unique is that we care about the long term existence of other species.
Can you name any other species that cares about the survival of another species? And while you are trying to think of one consider what % of the human species actually does care.

Block the fresh water supply to New York City to protect an endangered species upstream and how many of your neighbors are going to be willing to watch their children die to protect the other species?

And I actually said that humans are "harvestors". There is a difference between a "harvestor" and a "consumer".
 
Do we, really?

Really? No not really.
Only when it is convenient for what we want do we care about other species.

If we truly did, there wouldn't be any bulldozing down forests for construction, golf courses etc.. but I get your point.

If humans truly cared we would have always cared. We would have never done to the earth what we did.

[/QUOTE]Sometimes its a question of necessity, but not in all circumstances...[/QUOTE]

Yes, but what determines necessity?
Who sets that boundary for each species?
Should that be done by committee?

How many readers here don't want to be able to go out and collect an orchid to bring home to care for and enjoy?
 
I think the original point of the thread was not so much about why people collect, but why people collect species that are already easily available through other means.
 
How many readers here don't want to be able to go out and collect an orchid to bring home to care for and enjoy?

I recently saw this picture on Facebook:
Bellatulumwild.jpg


The picture shows 1200 plants of bellatulum harvested from the wild in Thailand.

Hell of a big home one would have to be in..:rolleyes:
 
I have to admit, on a small level, there is a certain degree of pleasure in being able to collect a plant from the wild. The other day we went upstate for a wedding. Walking around the synagogue in Woodstock, my son and I saw colonies of sweetfern (Comptonia peregrina) everywhere. I love that shrub, so I took 2 or 3 runners for my places in the city and LI. Given the hundreds of plants we saw, that was nothing. However, I would never consider taking more than that...and had there only been a few plants, I wouldn't have taken any.
 
Another picture... This time hirsutissimum in Vietnam. Found this on a Vietnamese forum:
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff244/GIANG_2005/IMG_2872.jpg

About half a rice bag on the photo. That's esquirolei by the way. hirsutissimum is very rare now, but it is possible to get sometimes from the extreme west.

They will be sold for the Vietnamese or Chinese new year in spike for those, sure... Price of all the plants on the photo, about 50USD. ( 1.000.000VND)
 
It's amazing how uniformly these clumps have grown, almost as if these came out of a nursery, even (all) the leafs look great.
 
It's amazing how uniformly these clumps have grown, almost as if these came out of a nursery, even (all) the leafs look great.

That's why when people say they never bought a wild plant, in fact they don't know. If they are collected at the right time, those esquirolei will root immediately, and have a nice root system in no time. Then most people will not be able to know if they are precultivated or art propagated.
 

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