DaisyI said:The interesting part: So someone crosses two orchids and has a whole flask (or several flasks) of this cross and they choose one and give it a name and it is the mother plant.
Then they start Mericloning this plant. So far so good. What Curtis says is that what has happened is that people have taken the Mericloned plants and made mericlones. But that second generation doesn't come true to the original plant. His lesson learned was don't accept 2nd generation mericlones because they will be different that the original.
Have you ever heard this before?
Yes, that sounds right. The mother plant is one of the seedlings raised from the cross of A x B (where all seedlings from A x B have a group name - aka the grex). This particular mother plant is then often mericloned and made available. Mericloning usually introduces some mutations, although the degree depends on the age and health of the mother plant as well as the quality of the cloning process.
Cloning a clone further exacerbates this problem of genetic decay and clones of clones often won't perform as well as the original or may actually show signs of mutation. Andy Easton discusses this a bit on his website's forum (
http://www.newhorizonorchids.c...).
