FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

Has anyone heard of this hybrid? I can’t seem to find it or the reverse. This and Diatas.

Well, theoretically it’s possible and someone may well have made it. However I have never heard of such a plant in circulation. Maybe I’ll make it someday.

What prompted you to bring up the question?

Bluefire wrote: ↑Wed Jul 20, 2022 9:55 pm What prompted you to bring up the question?

For Diatas- A cheap and toothy red nepenthes, like a bit less toothy smilodon (like have you seen this Diatas clone from Sumatra, Jeezzz - https://images.app.goo.gl/zoscvFmS5UhPzdnX6).

For Densiflora- Again prominent teeth, weird-ish shape, and striping when it gets to upper’s.

The pure species aren’t too rare or expensive to purchase at online nurseries. I don’t see many hybrids with them though. Maybe they’re reluctant bloomers? I wouldn’t know, I don’t grow either…

Kind of strange, now that I think of it. The species are around, so why don’t many hybrids exist?

Edit: Densiflora hybrids do seem to exist after all. But not with any other toothy plants…

I’ve noticed that some species are like that. Ex.- Sumantrana, hirsuta, gantungensis, pulchra, Mirabilis var. echinostoma…

I wasn’t aware that Nepenthes had this issue.

Some Nepenthes "complexes" seem to face compatibility issues. For example, only a single seed of rajah x robcantleyi germinated in-vitro for Borneo Exotics. I've heard of similar issues with rajah x truncata. I don't think many (any?) species are outright incompatible like some Drosera, Utricularia and Pinguicula species though.

Other times, crosses aren't produced purely because breeders don't have the appropriate blooming parents or desire to produce them. For example, several growers in Asia have produced extremely complex superb lowland hybrids involving ampullaria, mirabilis, globosa, bicalcarata, etc., but aren't crossed with highland plants largely because they don't grow well in the temperatures commonly experienced in that region. Meanwhile, I wouldn't expect to see Wistuba selling F4 amp x globosa in a thousand years . A few LL x HL crosses have been produced (for example, EP's nice hookeriana x ephippiata), but I feel like there's still much work to be done in that area of nep breeding.

I don't think I've seen hamata x densiflora/diatas yet, although Jeff Shafer produced edwardsiana x diatas (or the reverse... I forget), which will be an amazing toothy cross.

I'm not really a nep guy but I took a couple intro to stats classes in college so I'll take a stab at this. There are somewhere around 180 species of Nepenthes currently recognized. Of these, I'll take an extremely rough estimate of the number of species that have an approximately similar level of availability and distribution in cultivation to the three species listed, which I'll guess offhand could be around 50. If we take the number of permutations of 2 species from this group of 50 species, there are nearly 2500 possible crosses, or around 1250 if not counting reverses. Say my estimate was just a little off and it's actually closer to 60 species. That ends up pushing it up to roughly 3500/1750 potential crosses. Of course, that's only counting those species with similar availability and not the plenty of other less-commonly-available species in cultivation, some of which may even be more appealing for hybridization (aristolochioides, eddy, villosa, etc). Obviously there's plenty of other factors that would influence the likelihood of specific hybrids being made or not, but you can probably see why there's more than a few crosses that may not have been attempted, produced, or widely distributed yet - even if they were genetically possible.