Cattleya alaorii Cattleya alaorii Cattleya alaorii, commonly known as the Laelia alaorii, is a species of orchid endemic to Brazil (Bahia). The species was named after Mr. Alaor Oliveira, former employee at the University of São Paulo at Piracicaba, who first collected this species in a field excursion in the late 1960s. It was discovered in the 1970s in an isolated mountain chain near Itabuna, Bahia state. It grows in the very wet Bahia coastal forests ecoregion of the Atlantic Forest biome ("Mata Atlantica Brasileira"). It is found in rainforests at about above sea level. The plants are epiphytes in tall trees
Flowering plant be a common source of speciation in general, especially when it comes to radical adaptations that seem to have required inferior transitional forms. Flowering plants may have evolved in an isolated setting like an island or island chain, where the plants bearing them were able to develop a highly specialized relationship with some specific animal (a wasp, for example). Such a relationship, with a hypothetical wasp carrying pollen from one plant to another much the way fig wasps do today, could result in the development of a high degree of specialization in both the plant(s) and their partners. Note that