All the plants you mentioned are prone to iregular variegation. The other thing I know is if there are periods of low light conditions or to much shade with high doses of fertlizer...you get green pups and it might take 2 years to grow off the plants.
The extra fertilizer wont help if the plants lack green...some plants are prone to throw 1 in 3 pups as albino's so taht might be their genetic make up. Any particular plant doing that?

Hi Japie

You raise some interesting points. DeRolf is one that does produce the odd pup that isnt very nicely variegated or plain as HDD mentions. I have been putting balls in the cups of varigated plants for a while now and havent had a green pup....Maybe I am not putting as many?

Maybe when the plant is well nurished and not under any due stress it is able to "fight" off the virus...so as soon as conditions become more harsh the virus might make a come-back...I am just thinking out loud here...

Dennis

HDD and Dennis, thanks very much for the response.

Now if I want to get me some nice variegated neo's that are NOT prone to irregegular variegation, HDD, can you give me a few names, please?

Japie

"I have been putting balls in the cups of varigated plants for a while now"

*ouch* Dennis, don't you have a bath tub?

Okay, seriously...... I think we need to do some more research on the cellular origin of albinism. Maybe I'll try rereading that article you sent me, Japie, but what I got from reading it the first time was that it's mostly NOT viral. And I can't see how fertilizer could affect the arrangement of albino vs. green cells in the plant tissue, but if that happened every single time it's kind of hard to ignore. That's a real puzzle.

I don't have all of the cvs you mention, but my Crayola has never shown any instability. DeRolf occasionally throws a green or partially variegated pup, but mine doesn't seem to do it as often as yours does. Were the original plants you got only partially variegated? If so, they may be retaining more areas of green tissue even through several generations.

Even if it is just a case of unstable clones, why would fertilizer or light levels make it worse? There's no clear causal relationship there that I can see, although it has been shown that stress can trigger mutations, including variegation. That doesn't necessarily mean that the reverse is true though, i.e. that a lack of stress would eliminate the mutation.

I'd like to know the answer to this too. My problem is more often of variegated plants gradually going so albino that they can barely survive, and I don't understand what's causing that either.

Japie and fellow contributors to this thread,
Very interesting topic! I can't shed any light on the matter, except to say that I had some strange reactions on a couple of my broms after THAT frost last year. An Androlepis skinneri and Bill. Hallelujah, both severely damaged, threw subsequent variegated pups post frost. I'm hoping the variegation will be stable, fingers crossed! The variegation is weak, and tends to be only on one side of each plant. I'm assuming this is a stress reaction. I'll certainly be tilting those pups to encourage more pups from the variegated side.

Any suggestions on how to strengthen my chances?

K

There is an article in one of the old Bromelieceae newsletters on how they did it with one variegated leave on a Ae recurvata to create Aztec Gold. I'll try and find it for you over the weekend.

Japie

Hi Japie,

In my experience in variegation of bromeliads, I have 2 opinions about mediopicta and albomarginata.

For mediopicta.
1.Variegation is usually unstable. Bold variegation is more stable than striation as DeRolf.
2.Striated plants usually produce partial variegated pups. The green part is stronger and usually throw green pups when fertilized.
3.I usually remove the green pups and keep the full variegated plants, not partial variegation. Full variegated plants send good varieation to the generation.
4.Mediopicta plants do not produce albino plants

For albomarginata.
1.Albomarginata is stable. I have very nice generation of albomarginata. All produce nice variegation.
2.Albomarginata sometimes produce albino plants and die. I usually remove those unwanted plants.

Any comments!

Cheers
Yong

"*ouch* Dennis, don't you have a bath tub?"

I really like that smell Lisa...What to do....? LOL

Yong makes a valid point...I havent had an albino off of a variegated plant....Hmmmm and to add to that a lot of albo-marg plants are self-fertile!

Dennis!!!

"I really like that smell Lisa..."

I thought maybe you just had an unorthodox pollinating method, Dennis. Trying for a bigeneric, perhaps? Let me know if it works...

Yes, as far as pupping, Yong is right that white-margined plants are the ones that will sometimes throw albino pups, whereas it's the green-margined ones that tend to throw green pups.

I don't know if I agree that the albomarginates are more stable than the mediopictas, though. I hadn't noticed that. The ones that I've had the main plant go albino on me have mostly been those nifty unstable ones with both green and white margins. The white margins will start to dominate, and then gradually take over the whole plant. Hmmm.......

Here's an example of one that's going albino. You can see from the lower leaves that it started out nicely striated, but the new growth has been increasingly white, and it's not for lack of feeding. Fortunately the leaves haven't bruised too badly on this one, but I've had others where they all turned brown and shriveled up, and eventually had to be relegated to the trash pile.

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Random thought...although fertilizing may typically give fast green growth, if the plant has plenty of food available from fertilizer do you think it would encourage or 'allow' the albino growth? My cellular biology clearly isn't strong enough for me to say, but is there even any decision on the cellular level that would allow an unstable variegated plant to produce mostly white cells?