Please note: For October and November, we will be meeting back at the Pine Avenue Community Center from 4-7 pm, located at 3209 Harding Street, Carlsbad, CA.
This month, we are pleased to welcome Lou Jost, who will be sharing his talk “Adventures in Discovering, Describing, and Protecting New Andean Orchid Species”. Ecuador is the richest country in the world for orchids. During his 30 years there, Lou explored remote mountains and jungles, searching for new orchid species. He will talk about this search, particularly focused on miniatures, especially Lepanthes, one of the most diverse genera of orchids. He will feature some of the more than sixty new species he discovered, not only miniature orchids, but also big Sobralias and Maxillarias and spectacular new trees, a couple of amaryllis relatives, and others. He’ll also talk about the task of ensuring that these new discoveries survive in the wild, and how he and his friends protected the mountains where most of these discoveries were located.
Lou is a shared speaker with the San Diego County Orchid Society and will be giving his talk “Why are Orchids so Diverse? Clues from the Distribution of Andean Miniatures” on Tuesday, October 6th in Balboa Park. You can watch his talk on Zoom (contact Barry Reder or Alex Nadzan at president@palomarorchid.org for the link) or in person at Casa Del Prado, room 101.
Lou was born in Wisconsin and did graduate work in physics at the University of Texas. After a couple of years of that, he fell in love with the tropics and worked odd jobs to finance long trips to the forests of Mexico, Costa Rica, and eventually Ecuador where he settled down. He co-founded Fundacion EcoMinga in 2006 to protect the orchids and other species that he discovered. During that time he also revolutionized how ecologists quantify biodiversity, and fixed some foundational errors in population genetics, thanks to his training in mathematics.
This month’s plant table will consist of orchids from Ontario Orchids and 808 Orchids Kalapana