Happy Camper wrote:
WOW, and I get a response from the master himself
No way am I "the master". Perhaps the closest would be Jan Bastmeijer who will be at the upcoming AGA convention. See Jan's website, The Crypts Pages
http://132.229.93.11/Cryptocoryne/index.html It is the premier website on crypts. Nothing else comes close.
Another master would be Neils Jacobsen who has done experiments in hybridizing crypts and who has also done a lot of the work determining chromosome numbers. Neils' work is largely responsible for the recent revisions of crypt taxonomy that are reflected in Kasselmann's book, Aquarium Plants.
Another upcoming master is Yujii Sasaki, who is connected in some way with Rayon Vert Aqua. He may be the owner, for all I know. He has found two new species in areas thought to have been worked over by other collectors. These two are given species status because they are considerably different from the other known crypts from these areas. He may have more new species than those two. He has a number of unknowns and you can buy one of his rare or unknown collected plants for $300 to $400. You may have to go to Japan to buy it. I don't know if he ships to America. If you go to the Rayon Vert Aqua web site,
http://www.rva.ne.jp/main.htm, you will find it is in Japanese, but it has lots of pictures, and you can stumble around by clicking on anything that causes your cursor arrow to change into a hand. The site has endless picture galaries and, deep in these galaries, you can find a big bunch of pictures taken when Rayon Vert people visited Neils Jacobsen in Copenhagen
Dr. Shawn Prescott, owner of FishVet.com, has acquired a number of rare crypts, not otherwise available in America, and is working on getting tissue cultures of these plants going. If he is successful, he will be able to sell them cheap. Right now, he is selling them for up to $40.00, which is pretty cheap compared to Sasaki's rare crypts.
The taxonomy revision of crypts is in no way finished. It has a long way to go. Most of the crypt species we know were based on isolated specimens that were brought back by the early botanical explorers. They were given species status simply because they were different from the other isolated plants that were known. Now that new plants are coming in from a greater number of collectors, all kinds of intermediate plants are filling in the gaps that were originally used to differentiate the original species. There are now all kinds of plants that are intermediate. Jan Bastmeijer's pages show all this variation within a supposed species along with plants that appear to straddle two species and could be one or the other. One species merges into another. We are accustomed to believing that species are distinct, and that is true if you are only looking at plants or animals from one site. When you travel around and collect at different sites, this nice separation gets lost. I think that we may wind talking about crypt complexes, such as the C. wendtii complex or the C. beckettii complex. In any event, it will be a long time before it is all worked out.
Meanwhile, enjoy your crypts, and don't worry too much what species you have. Nobody knows, yet, and maybe no one will ever be able to separate all the crypts into definite species.