Encyclia dichroma

[Mauro Rosim]

Here's my E. dichroma in bloom now. There's some controversy on E. dichroma and E. ghillanyi being the same species. For me
these two are sister plants, but not the same species. The main reason to consider them species apart is the same accepted as valid for so many other pair of similar species (labiata/warneri, loddigesii/harrisoniana etc), their habitats are geographically apart: E. dichroma grows near the Atlantic Ocean in Bahia, where the vegetation is exuberant due to the presence of the ocean and E. ghillanyi 400 km inland, isolated in inselbergs in the middle of what is known as 'caatinga', a semi-desert kind of vegetation. These 400 km of separation were the main reason to keep them apart until last year, when, in order to verify whether they were good species or not, Cassio Van den Berg published the results of a genetic research he did on 135 individuals collected from both populations. The genetic research was made using markers of the type ISSR - Inter Single Sequence Repeats and the results were published during the 55º Brazilian Congress of Genetics. He concludes that there are genetic reasons to keep them apart as good species.
As to the flowers themselves, the most relevant difference between dichroma and ghillanyi is in the petal morphology: broad petals in dichroma and always thin in ghillanyi. There's also the fact that E. ghillanyi is in general a sequential bloomer. I never saw one with more than two flowers at the same time. For the rest, the flowers are the same.