‘Big Pink’ orchid turns out to be new species
While studying a cultivated plant might be quite a motivator and serve as a starting point for scientific quests, the assumptions that one has found a new species at the florist’s could easily be wrong.
Not only is the place of origin, written on the label, often doubtful, but there is always the chance of accidentally describing a man-made hybrid as a new species.
Such could have been the case of Bobby Sulistyo from Leiden University and the University of Applied Sciences Arnhem and Nijmegen and his colleagues from the Netherlands and Australia when they discovered that although previously assumed impossible, the relatives of an orchid variety called Big Pink, they were surveying, could also make human-assisted hybrids.
Moreover, both of the specimens they have had at hand had come from uncertain place of origin.
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