Botany Photo of the Day

Andreas from Bogotá, Colombia (aka Quimbaya@Flickr - check out his other orchid photos!) submitted this photograph of an orchid cultivated by noted Colombian orchid grower, Sócrates Forero (BPotD Flickr Group Pool | original image). Thank you Andreas!

Scaphosepalum antenniferum is native to northwestern South America, i.e., Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. Its plant family, the Orchidaceae, contains over eight hundred described genera and roughly twenty-five thousand species. With so many different kinds of orchids, it is necessary to divide the family into smaller chunks to be able to effectively communicate about the plants within it. Orchid enthusiasts and biologists will use subfamily, tribe and subtribe as intermediate groupings between family and genus. In the case of Scaphosepalum, it is often described as being a pleurothallid orchid, meaning it is in the subtribe Pleurothallidinae (tribe: Epidendreae and subfamily: Epidendroideae). The Pleurothallidinae contains ~30 genera (roughly 3.5% of all genera), but those 30 genera contain over four thousand species – ~16% of all orchids! Scaphosepalum is a small genus within the Pleurothallidinae, containing only thirty or so species.

Botany / technology resource link: Plant Life for Virtual Terrain is part of the Virtual Terrain Project, whose goal is “to foster the creation of tools for easily constructing any part of the real world in interactive, 3D digital form”. It's a fascinating site that discusses the challenges of rendering plants digitally for video games, animated movies, computer simulations and scientific modelling. It also evaluates the tools available and provides an extensive list of resources.