devo your off in no mans land when it comes to variegation/albomarginated broms..only a handful of hybridizers are successful in this area....Mr Skotak being probally the 'man' where this subject is concerned. RL Frasier is another one who is successful in this area

There are no easy answers, Devo, or if there are, nobody's told me about them. Your first little Vriesea has strong enough variegation that I think there's a good chance the pups will have it too...... if it ever pups. Are ALL of its siblings mad clumpers like the one in the second picture? I don't really know Vr. carinata or its hybrids; is this normal behavior do you think? I've occasionally had seedlings of different genera form masses of small pups without maturing, but it's usually an isolated case, definitely not normal, and they don't bloom either. Since yours is getting ready to bloom, it must be maturing properly. I know your question is about the variegate, I'm just wondering why it would be the only one of the grex not pupping like that. Highly variegated plants sometimes grow slower than their green brothers since they have less chlorophyll to work with, so maybe that has something to do with it. Both variegation and abnormal growth patterns can be a result of damage or stress, which you say your plants were subjected to. I've heard that some commercial variegates are produced by exposing the seedlings to harsh chemicals, including herbicides (presumably in weak doses?). NOT something I want to experiment with.

The Alcantarea does present a challenge. Even "grass pups" can retain the variegation if they come out from the right spot at the base of a variegated leaf, but there's no guarantee of that. I had a Till. viridiflora v. variegata, which also produces that type of pup, and only one pup showed any kind of variegation. Same with the variegated form of Vr. Splendide. They can be green, albino, partially variegated, etc., and I don't know what you do about that. I've never grown A. nahoumii, but if it's anything like A. imperialis and vinicolor it should pup when it's still young, so maybe you won't have too long to wait. At first I was going to say that I'd attempt the screwdriver if your plant reverts to green, but now I'm having second thoughts about that. I'm not sure how that would affect pupping on an Alcantarea.

There are a couple of variegated forms of A. imperialis on FCBS, 'Gladys' and 'Helenice'. Both were posted by Bromeliario Imperialis, so it might be worth contacting them and asking if the variegation passes on or if those are just individual specimens. I think it's wrong to register them if they're only one of a kind, but sometimes people do that because they're just so proud of it.

There may be another way. Years ago on a visit to Ron Parkhurst's place on Maui I noticed he had a Werauhia sanguinolenta that was pupping from the inflorescence, which is not its normal behavior. I asked him about it and he said he'd treated it with some kind of chemical to make it do that, since Werauhias just give the one big "replacement pup" in the center of the plant. At the time I thought he was just wasting his time because Werauhias are such copious seed producers, and even though seedlings are slow the sheer numbers you can get make it a more efficient method. Later on, though, I saw a picture of David Shiigi's W. 'Edna Shiigi', which is a variegated seedling of sanguinolenta, so I'll bet that David and Ron were just trying to figure out a way to propagate that thing. I don't know what the chemical was and I never asked David if he'd managed to successfully propagate Edna (maybe I should rephrase that, since that's his mom!), but that might be worth looking into.