Disa is a genus of flowering plants in the family Orchidaceae. It comprises about 182 species. Most of the species are indigenous to tropical and southern Africa, with a few more in the Arabian Peninsula, Madagascar, and Réunion. Disa bracteata is naturalised in Western Australia, where the local name is "African weed-orchid." The genus Disa was named by P.J. Bergius in 1767. It was named after Disa, the heroine of a Swedish legend. Description The plants grow from a fleshy tuberous root which is a source of maltodextrins which are used as a sugar substitute. Some species attain a height of 90 cm. The flowers are solitary or arranged in racemes. The petals and the lip are small. The flowers consist essentially of the sepals. The flowers range in color from very light to dark red. Pollination Disa exhibits a variety of pollination syndromes. Each species of Disa usually has a single species as pollinator and nearly every available pollinating insect is employed by some species of Disa. Species that adapted to the same pollinator often independently evolved a similar floral morphology which confounded the infrageneric classification of Disa until cladistic analysis was applied to DNA sequences from this genus. Examples of convergent evolution in Disa pollination include the following: flowers pollinated by butterflies have evolved twice, for example the pollination of Disa uniflora by the Table mountain Pride Butterfly Aeropetes tulbaghia (Satyrinae) flowers with conspicuous deception, pollinated by carpenter bees, have evolved twice. long-spurred flowers, pollinated by long-tongued flies, have evolved four times. night-scented flowers, pollinated by moths, have evolved three times. Disa serves as an example of how speciation can be caused by changes in pollinator availability and evolution. Some Disa species are pollinated by sunbirds and have pollinaria that stick to the feet of the sunbirds when they perch on the inflorescence. Phylogeny The first molecular phylogeny of the genus involved comparison of nuclear ribosomal ITS1, 5.8S rDNA, and ITS2 sequences, and showed that Herschelia and Monadenia were nested within a paraphyletic Disa. In Genera Orchidacearum volume 2, Disa and Schizodium compose the subtribe Disinae of the tribe Diseae. After that volume was published in 2001, molecular phylogenetic studies showed that Schizodium is nested within Disa. Schizodium comprises only six species, all endemic to South Africa. In a classification of orchids that was published in 2015, Chase et alii placed Schizodium in synonymy under Disa. They also