Biologists from the United States and Mexico have described a new orchid species from a mountainous area in central Panama.
Lophiaris silverarum. Image credit: K. Silvera / University of California, Riverside.
Orchidaceae, commonly known as the Orchid family, contains the largest number of plant species in the world – up to 30,000. Panama alone has about 1,100 known species.
Orchids are unique in that the flower’s female and male reproductive parts are fused together. They can easily hybridize or cross and, as a result, some 300,000 orchid hybrids are man-made and commercially available to the public.
The newly discovered plant has been named Lophiaris silverarum.
It belongs to Lophiaris, an orchid genus that contains consists of 25 species and 3 natural hybrids found in southern Florida, the West Indies, from northern Mexico to southern Brazil and northern Argentina.
Lophiaris silverarum, described in a paper in the journal Phytotaxa (preview in .pdf), is known to grow only in central Panama. The plant blooms in November, the flowers lasting about a month.
“Orchids are a difficult and confusing taxonomic group. People who specialize in the Orchid family usually spend years naming different species based on DNA and morphology. Sometimes plants can look alike morphologically, but DNA informs us that they are very different species, which makes naming the species difficult,” explained Dr Katia Silvera from the University of California, Riverside, who, along with her father, discovered the new species.
“The diversity of orchids is best seen in the tropics, where, unfortunately, habitat is being destroyed very fast. As a result, we are rapidly losing the diversity of orchid species. Although there are many orchid species unnamed in nature, it is actually quite difficult to determine for sure that an orchid is unnamed. They are difficult to find and difficult to tell apart.”
“Orchid species are the raw materials for hybrids, and there is a lot to discover about how these species evolved and became such a successful group. Orchid research will only thrive if efforts to conserve tropical rainforest are put in place.”
Dr Silvera added: “we are in the process of propagating the species in vitro in Panama for commercial purposes.”
“My father, Gaspar Silvera, is the owner of a small orchid company in Panama that specializes in propagating native orchid species but because Lophiaris silverarum grows slowly, taking about four years to reproduce in vitro, from seed to the first bloom, it will take many years before it is available to the public in Panama first, and then made commercially available outside of Panama.”
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Carnevali G. et al. 2014. A new species of mule-ear oncidium with straw-yellow flowers (Orchidaceae: Oncidiinae, Lophiaris) from central Panama. Phytotaxa, vol. 162, no. 3; doi: 10.11646/phytotaxa.162.3.5
