I took a look at your Panama travel blog – very nice. Not your typical real estate type come-on! Good luck with it.

Nice question. If you look at the distribution map for the species at GBIF, you’ll see that it is found on the Pacific slope in Central America and northern South America. It disappears from the Pacific side of South America as you travel south.

The link is at http://data.gbif.org/species/14249807.

I hope this helps.
Mary

well but, “savana” ios better to write like “Sabana”

bye

In fact, your photo of the orchid is not representative of what I see in my yard. Mine frequently have nine or ten flowers in a dense head, as opposed to what appears to be half that number in a looser head in your illustration. This makes the two much more similar in appearance. In fact, the biggest difference seems to be scale, the orchid infloresences are noticeably bigger.

Smitten, I started taking pictures of the two in juxtaposition and last fall planted a strawberry jar with orchids in the top vacancies and milkweeds below. I’m waiting for them to all grow out and bloom. Since the milkweeds seem lankier here, I’m hoping they will all bloom about the same height. Should be striking.

This morning I heard an NPR story about Darwin and orchids and the floral mimicry idea was presented as fact. Now I’m online, running that down and somewhat crestfallen — it is an appealing conclusion to jump to.

I will say I have seen butterflies perched on the orchid flowers, but what they thought they were doing there (resting, feeding, etc.), I have no idea. I’ll try to be more observant.

One angle that needs covering is how often Epidendrum successfully reproduces from seed — they set seed here but reproduction seems entirely vegetative here in my yard. If that’s true elsewhere then the mimicry, if it exists, would probably need to contribute some other advantage.

You’re right. It is a spittle bug. This post has been moved. When you go to the current site, you’ll see that someone else brought this to my attention. You can see the other comments here: http://ntsavanna.com/organic-eggs/.