President of the Orchid Conservation Alliance.

Peter Tobias is President and one of three co-founders of the Orchid Conservation Alliance. The goal of the OCA is to mobilize the orchid growing community to preserve wild orchid habitat. Many orchids, as with other flora and fauna, are in danger of extinction due to human created impacts on their environment. These impacts are due to collection, logging, agriculture, and many other forms of habitat destruction. The OCA raises funds from donations, sales, and ecotourism to purchase and protect orchid rich habitat. At present the OCA supports reserves in Ecuador, Brazil, and Colombia. Peter’s talk will briefly describe the goals and methods of the OCA, focusing primarily on the Selva de Ventanas reserve in Colombia. If time permits, images from some of the OCA’s other reserves and OCA’s Orchids in the Wild trips will be shown. His talk is entitled “Protecting Orchids in the Wild with the OCA: Don’t be caught Napping!”

Peter started growing orchids on a Chicago windowsill in the mid - 1970’s with a white phalaenopsis. His interest grew when a friend helped him to import some plants from India and Brazil so that he got a sense of the variety of orchids out there; an ornithocephalus or a dendrochilum is a lot different from a phalaenopsis. Ever since then he has enjoyed collecting and trying to grow odd species. Orchid growing became a lot easier when he moved to Southern California in 1980 and joined the San Diego County Orchid Society; the majority of his collection is now grown outdoors.

The monthly meeting starts at 7:30 PM and will be held online:

https://meet.google.com/suu-oabp-kqt

Send images in for the showtable by 8pm Sunday, July 12.