On Feb 5, 11:55*am, "K Barrett" wrote:
I agree. *I was about to ask Patricia Harding whether she felt the
normalization of relations with teh rebels and drug cartels have allowed
greater freedom of movement in the back woods of Colombia such that more of
these may come to light. *Patricia loves going to the shows and never misses
a chance - which is why I was going to ask her, since she's been there
recently. *I recall D'Alessario once saying that you'd be an idiot to go
down some of the roads and trails that led off the main roads. That you
never knew when the side road would end or what/who was at the end of it.
Years ago when I first got into the judging program teh AOS was very worried
about judges going to Colombia to the shows. *In case of kidnap. *Luckily it
all turned out to be OK. Once I was researching the range for an orchid and
I cracked up to see that there were herbarium specimens collected all along
its range in teh Andes, all except for Colombia. *I guess nobody wanted to
go out to the boonies, LOL! *But that was then and this is now.

I can't think of another two toned phrag, can you?

K Barrett

"Sue Erickson" wrote in message

...

For as long as people have lived/explored in S. America -- Suddenly
there are new species that are THAT beautiful. *Were we blind for
years?

On Fri, 30 Jan 2009 18:14:04 -0800, "K Barrett"
wrote:

I may be the last on the planet to know there's a new phrag. *This one
comes
from Columbia and is in the same group as Phrag schlimii.

http://www.orchidspecies.com/phragmanzurii.htm

Pretty cool that its a pink pouch with green sepals and petals.

K Barrett

SuE
http://orchids.legolas.org/gallery/orchids

It was interesting last night; there was a documentary on TVO (a
station run by the government of Ontario) about a recent expedition to
Guyana. The area they went to had so few indigenous people that the
animals had virtually no fear of human beings. They had never been
hunted. And these people, a moderately large and well equipped party,
were the first scientists to visit the area. They said nothing about
orchids, but they found new species almost every day. The area in
question was enormous, and yet the area the team was able to sample
was likely only of the order of a few hundred square meters.

The last time I did field work in which we identified and measured
every plant within quadrats 10 m square, it took a couple hours to do
one quadrat that size, and the team could thoroughly examine every
specimen in each quadrat could complete surveys of only 5 or 6 such
quadrats. Mind you, as we did it, a part of the record was a detailed
map of precisely where each specimen was located within the quadrat.
This was in mixed decidious forest in southern Ontario, so the sites
we examined were very easy to get to. I can imagine that trying to do
similar sampling in Guyana, on the site covered by the documentary I
saw last night, would require as much as a quarter of your time just
getting to, and returning from, the site, hiking through trackless
rainforest (there were no clearings where a helicopter could land, at
least none shown in the documentary, and the river was effectively
impassable. One of the individual adventures they showed last night
involved one individual going into an area that had to be hundreds of
square kilometers in extent (to get there, he had to descend a large
cliff that separated their main camp site from the area he went to),
and yet the individual appeared to be able to sample a transect a few
hundred meters long. Mind you, think think he, and a couple other
members of that team, were insane to be climbing up or down rock that
seemed to crumble at the slightest touch.

The point is that this documentary highlights just how difficult and
expensive it is to properly survey the life in any given ecosystem,
and why it is certain, even in the absence of the political conflict
in places like Columbia, there are countless species that remain to be
discovered. Predators, human and non-human, only make it much more
dangerous to even attempt sampling interesting sites. I love going
into the boonies, when my health allows it, but I ain't suicidal.

Cheers,

Ted