BEIJING: Although there are at least 25,000 species of orchids on Earth and 8 percent of all flowering plants are orchids, some of them are threatened with extinction and have been dubbed the “pandas of the plant world.”
Zhang Shibao, a researcher from Kunming Institute of Botany under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has paid special attention to the endangered strain, called paphiopedilum, after spending over two decades on the whole orchid family.
“After being discovered in the 1980s on a few mountainsides along the Nujiang River in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province, it became a critically endangered plant due to its ornamental value among flower and plant lovers and collectors,” Zhang told the Global Times on Wednesday. Zhang now checks the growth of orchid seedlings every day, like they are his own kids. He explained that paphiopedilum appear in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) Appendix I together with China’s giant pandas, with international trade strictly forbidden.
According to Zhang, orchids are very sensitive to environmental changes and human activities. “Habitat destruction and large-scale digging have harmed these plants in the wild,” he said.
– The Daily Mail-Global Times News exchange item
