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Hi all, I have reason to believe that Pygmy sundews can be crossed with Petiolaris sundews. Please hear me out.

I downloaded rbcl sequences from NCBI and made a phylogenetic tree. It shows the pygmies and the petiolaris diverging rapidly, and quasi-adaptive radiation on the Petiolaris and Pygmy clade.

I am already crossing Petiolaris x Micrantha, but does anyone have/is willing to carry out any other crosses with other species? I am willing to send an SASE, with a few cuttings as compensation.

Paleacea, Micrantha, Roseana, leucoblasta, etc.. are very good, but scorpioides and similar upright species are too old for crossing, according to MEGA-X genetic analysis.

Thanks for your helps!

Hmm... if your theory turns out to be true I’d pay top dollar for a hybrid like that. I do happen to have D. paleacea, but I would rather send out gemmae.

That's fascinating stuff. He's right, if that works then you hit a jackpot I'm sure. A cross of those two would be wild lol. I'm interested in seeing how this plays out.

Have me wondering if my pulchella and lanata could cross

I just got some D. palacea platystigma and roseana gemmae so if I get any flowers I’ll let you know.

I was just looking at my petios and pygmies yesterday and was noticing how similar they looked! I think I have flowers forming on my petios, and sure send me an SASE for some pygmy pollen. I can supply you with pollen from paleacea, pulchella (Pink Flower), and allantostigma. I have hundreds of pygmy flowers currently going in my greenhouse haha.

Also, on this ICPS genetics page it shows that pygmies and petios are closely related:
https://www.carnivorousplants.org/cp/ev ... aPhylogeny

Yeah. It looks that rbCL plastid is seperated by only ~20 nucleotide differences. 2n=2n in both cases as well.

I'd pay top dollar, too if it worked. Who knows, maybe they'd even make gemmae (that's unrealistic, but a fun idea) I'd be interested in the hairs/flowers, however.

Oh, I have Pygmy flowers, only Mircrantha, but I was wondering if somebody could cross it, I'd send an SASE, and toss the seeds into tissue culture?

@apollyon, the Lanata appears to be relatively close to pulchella. Would you mind risking a few flowers to give it a shot? I'd put pygmy pollen on a Petiolaris flower, just so you get more seeds.

This is all going to be published in a relevant journal. Thanks for your help!

Is anyone's petios flowering?

Quick repost--

More evidence (but let's not get ahead of ourselves).

Using GBIF data, and morphological characteristics from 3 pygmies and 4 petios, I found that their morphological characteristics [lamina, hairs, tentacle length, tentacle density] respond roughly the same to environmental factors [humidity, etrans, temp]. This suggests that speciation could have been adaptive radiation. The fact that petio x petio x petio .... is fertile also alludes to this.

Absolutely I'd risk some flowers lol. It's the only petio I have so it's effectively sterile as it is right now. My lanata is recovering but if it shows its going to flower I'll definitely give it a shot. My pulchellas are currently flowering. I'll need to try to harvest the pollen and store it. Is it better to keep that kind of thing in the refrigerator or does it make a difference?

I'm unsure about storage.

It's nice to have a community like this where we can make coolness happen. Currently, I've got micrantha and roseana flowering.

If anybody has Petio flowers right now that they'd like to risk, I'm sending an SASE immediately, with tons of pollen samples.

If it works, Yay! If it doesn't work, well at least we learn something about our plants. (Or keep trying in vain to make more hybrids).

I've got 5 vials of TC media, so if anybody gets seeds from the cross, I'll flash em up. Here are crosses of interest.

(I know I wrote em backwards, sorry. Basic logic dictates that pygmy pollen should go, since otherwise we may just get like 3 seeds per flower) In this case it's Father x Mother.

Nivea, Oreopodieon, Nitidula, and Pulchella may work but they're the most evolved and therefore the most risky.


Leucoblasta X Any Petiolaris
Micrantha x Any Petiolaris
Pulchella X Lanata, Ordensis, Caduca
Roseana X Hairy Petiolaris
Any Pygmy x Caduca
Sewellia, Nivea x Petiolaris (any kind)

Thanks for your help all!

Any progress?

Hungry carnivores it would be wise to collect all the parents for your hybrids yourself rather than rely on others to send pollen or successfully pollinating a flower. This way you can make the crosses yourself and more things will be in your control. Be careful with tissue culture since media is species specific for optimal growth.

- Jose

A little off topic but do you use any particular service for barcoding? Gels are accessible to me, but I've got some samples of a plant that may or may not be a subspecies unique to a sky island near me. I've had some discussion with a couple botanists that were genuinely surprised that I found a population where I did. The next step would be to take some fresh samples and see if we can find substantial differences with the hope of determining when the plant was introduced. As far as I know that is impractical to do with a simple gel setup.

Exciting stuff with the hybrids! I've had suspicions about some of the Australian drosera. I can't wait to see the results

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