Lepanthes calodictyon- tolerant of water on leaves?

I just got one of these little jewels, and I'm hoping I can get it to do well. I have an orchid terrarium with a Mistking system (automatic mister with very fine spray) and a circulation fan, which has been doing well for other species. The issue I'm having is that this little orchid's leaves seem custom-made to catch and hold water, with that cupped shape. It came in with a number of buds, and the buds practically get submerged on a couple of leaves.

Does this tolerate water on the leaves better than other orchids? I don't think I have anywhere I can put it where it'll get mostly sprayed around the roots, and still be in decent humidity. And I can't picture how it gets water in the wild without having the leaves stay wet for at least a little while, unless it grows somewhere that never rains, only fogs heavily.

Basically, I'd love to hear from anyone who grows this beauty with an automatic mister. Hand spraying isn't an option, I have a fatigue issue and would miss a lot of spraying sessions.

 

It arrived with flower buds, has bloomed with said buds, and is continuing to grow new buds and bloom with those. I know some orchids will flower when stressed, trying to reproduce before they die, but I'm hoping the blooming is a good sign here. At the very least, I'm glad to see that the buds are blooming just fine even with how wet they get.

Seems healthy enough to me. Hard to get a picture with the lighting, my phone doesn't like it. The two yellowed leaves were like that when it came in; I assume they're just old. That leaf at the back is the one that catches the most water, being angled up like that, and stays wet the longest.

I'm really hoping this plant does well for me. It's such an interesting shape, and I love the leaf patterns and the tiny, precious flowers. Any tips? I'm growing it intermediate-warm, kept moist, with fairly high humidity but not stagnant air.

 

Oh, right, that lovely trick. I had an L. gargoyla that was growing and blooming, then abruptly self-destructed over the course of about a week. Best guess is it got a little too dry while I was trying to fine-tune the sprayer schedule.

Do orchids ever 'lag' in showing a problem? I have a small reef tank, so I have some experience growing corals. If they're stressed, it can take up to a couple of weeks for them to physically show that stress, meaning you might not realize what the problem is because it started half a month ago. It also means that you can fix the problem and still lose the coral, if it takes two weeks to start recovering and doesn't last that long.
It also means that you can buy a coral and have it do quite well for a few weeks, then slowly start going downhill, because it was coasting on the conditions from the last tank and the current conditions are just now hitting it. Do orchids ever do that sort of thing? Or will a micro-mini orchid newly placed in subpar conditions tend to show it reasonably fast?

The mount moss for this little guy is a bit more moist than some of my other plants, but if I were to take the moss and squeeze it hard (I will not, it has roots in there), it wouldn't drip any water. So it is, I think, a reasonable moisture level.

I misspoke about the light; it's working just fine for the plants, and looks nice in person. I just have a hard time taking nice-looking photos with my phone camera because of the exact color of the lights.

The misting is because that's how I keep everything watered, and the humidity nice and high. I have a circulation fan in there, and it loses humidity fast if I don't regularly have the mister spray everything.



This is my Lepanthopsis astrophora. It's directly in the path of one of the sprayers. Every time the sprayer goes off, its leaves and flowers get soaked. When it blooms, the flowers will sometimes be caught inside a droplet of water for half an hour or more after the morning spraying.
Either it doesn't mind, or it likes this, because it's bloomed 3 times and nearly tripled in size since I put it there in April 2021. The flowers last a tidy couple of weeks, so I don't think they're dropping early at all. The wonders of air movement, I suppose.
The L. calodictyon doesn't get nearly this wet, but I thought I'd show this one anyway, because it still entertains me that this little fella gets soaked and does just fine. Everything around it stays slightly drier, though you can't tell in this photo, the sprayers had just gone off.

 

Oh, lovely. I wish we had sci-fi scanners that we could point at a plant and view whether or not it was happy with its conditions. It would make so many things so much easier.

If I put an orchid in a temperature or moisture range it doesn't like, and it lags on starting to decline, will it grow at all while it's lagging? In other words, I have a couple of plants that arrived with small new leaves and are growing those leaves out larger; does that mean they're doing reasonably well, or could they be lagging?

If a micro-mini orchid still seems to be doing well a month after arrival, can I be reasonably sure that the general environmental conditions (light, moisture level, temperature) are to its liking?

I have a phone app that may help with the watching for decline. It's called A Florist, and it lets you create entries for your plants. You can upload photographs to those entries and have them seen in chronological order. When I have a new plant, I try to remember to photograph it every week, to see if there's any sort of trend. Once it's had a couple months and seems to be happy, I photograph less often, maybe once a month. It's fun to see the progress of the plants, and it means that, if something starts declining, I have a good chance at spotting the difference between the photos.

I haven't had any visible fungi in this setup, aside from a dash of white mold on the leaf litter when it was first added (very common in new terrariums and seems harmless unless there's a plant right next to it), but that's still good to know about the fungicide.

 

The new growths seem to be on track to be the same size as the other leaves, but they're currently small growths that haven't matured yet. Whatever the term is for a leaf bud. A baby leaf, like this one:

If a plant arrives with a baby leaf, is placed in unsuitable conditions, and lags in showing its distress, will the baby leaf grow into an adult leaf while it's lagging, or will the baby leaf stay a baby leaf?

 

Fair enough; nature doesn't have so many hard-and-fast rules. Infinitely frustrating when you like clear lines and boundaries.

I know some about variable leaf sizes, mostly from my Nepenthes. The same principle applies to just about any plant that has leaves, I think. I was more asking, if an immature leaf grows into a mature leaf of any size, how good of a sign is that?

Since I've turned this into a general question thread, any tips on L. gargoyla? I like the colors, the odd shape, and the two different types of leaves, and I'd like to not kill another one.

It's nice to get answers to relatively specific questions, thank you both. I have some experience with houseplant orchids, Nepenthes (vining pitcher plants), pygmy sundews, and some relatively easy terrarium plants in a dart frog vivarium I used to have. I also had a micro orchid terrarium a few years ago, but lost almost everything in it and had to rehome the rest when a chronic fatigue condition got bad and I couldn't keep up with the upkeep.
So I have experience with plants and general plant troubleshooting, but most of them were a lot less specific in their desires than some of these little guys. I'm decent with trying to get my own research done online, but Googling variations on "do orchids lag" doesn't seem like it'll get anywhere.

 

Seems like good advice to me, thank you.

While I'm at it, a question about etiquette here on this forum. If someone posts pictures of a rare plant that looks like it's definitely big enough to be propagated, is it rude to ask if they ever have any for sale or trade? I'm not planning on running around treating the place like a menu, I just wanted to check whether that's allowed here on the off chance I see something I've been looking for.

 

Ooh, asking for a source is a good idea, I'll just do that. Problem solved.

I'm definitely not about to ask someone to divide their specimen plant for some random person on the Internet; more along the lines of "if you do happen to propagate this, I'm interested".