Maintaining Varieties of Species

[rainforest]

I would like to mention the important aspect of maintaining species integrity by keeping good records and data regarding seed original clones. If you have had access to wild seed collected material, you owe it to yourself and the nepenthes community to keep all the data available on that plant. It is so difficult to substantiate information regarding species when the tag is lost or if all the information is kept on a plastic tag subject to corrosion and melt-down.

So much habitat is lost on a rapid scale that information regarding possible locality variants will be important for anyone trying to differentiate why some species have a characteristic unique and others do not.

Even the common N. alata has shown to be as varied as having distinct sub-species status. We need to try and conserve this idea of locality variation as far as possible.

So keep your information handy on a computer or better yet, in a log book of known information. As collectors may lose their information, you should have them known.

M

[rainforest]

We're seeing vast variations of N. rafflesiana, ampullaria, mirabilis, Viking, and the thorelii-smilesii complexes and even natural hybrids such as in Hookeriana. Taking the time to even create named varieties based on characteristics or localities becomes important tools to keeping and maintaining the breeding integrity of varietal species alive.

I believe all species has a number of varieties. But alas, many are already lost due to only keeping one tc clone of that particular species available. We see variations in every species we encounter, yet see less than 1% of variations kept alive via the usual propagative methods associated with traditional tc cloning process.

Save your seed-grown and original material specimens. While they may not be a known or tc cloned form, they are unique and of a higher value.

M

[Robiii]

Higher quality has never failed from what I've seen in life.