Alocasia Amazonica

I realize due to my mail a few are tired of this subject so I'm about to wrap it up.  I do believe some that are interested in tissue culture and how it affects the plants we grow might find these notes from Denis Rotolante interesting. 

Another very interesting event this week was the USDA elected to change the information on its website to no longer indicate Alocasia x amazonica should be credited to André:

http://www.ars-grin.gov/cgi-bin/npgs/html/taxon.pl?312551

If someone that reads Aroid l had anything to do with that I would like to give you my thanks. 

I am in hopes we can at the very least soon have a page on the IAS website which explains how all the commonly held misconceptions regarding Alocasia Amazonica evolved and give credit to Salvadore Mauro for his creation.

Steve
www.ExoticRainforest.com


Denis Rotolante wrote:
I have on good sources that the parents of Alocasia  x Amazonica were A. watsoniana and A. sanderiana. However, since lowii Grandis, lowii Veitchii, Watsoniana and longiloba have all been reclassified by taxonomists as one swarm all belonging to the species Alocasia longiloba, the parentage should be Alocasia longiloba and sanderiana. It does not make a difference unless you are trying to remake the hybrid.
 
I was growing Alocasia x Amazonica back in the 1980's from tissue cultured liners. One of the plants exhibited new characteristics; heavier leaf substance, shorter petioles, better shipping qualities and slower growth than the standard plants. It was a sport from the standard Amazonica type created by genetic changes in Tissue Culture, I called Polly. Scott Hyndman insisted I give a piece to him to put in culture. The rest is history. It became the standard of excellence in alocasias for many years. It's still hard to beat although the value has been degraded by the fact that it was over produced by chinese labs that flooded the market with knock offs.
 
I'm not sure by todays rules of nomenclature that it can be called Alocasia Amazonica as something happened in the lab spontaneously to change the genetic make up of the original plant. I would leave that to someone else to figure out. I just call it Polly.

From a separate email:

.most people do not understand that TC forces changes in the genetic makeup of plants just as sexual reproduction. when TC does it we see a lot more of the bad ones because they survive long enough to mature. When nature does it... the deleterious changes in the genes do not survive, only the favorable ones make it to reproduce into the next generation.. If you could see the number of bad genetic results from TC that have resulted in disaster...entire crops of defective plants in the foliage industry have been produced. Sometimes however a positive change occurs giving us a Poly.

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