Fungus-Eating Flowers:Orchids, Climate Change, & the Nature of Evolution

July 5, 2023 11:01 AM

Popular since collectors first obsessed over it in Victorian England, the charismatic orchid now commands millions of dollars in research. Far from just pretty faces, orchids are allowing scientists to ask fundamental questions about how plants interact with other species in their environment and about the very nature of ecology and how we classify organisms. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan (7 comments total)

This article really deserves to be expanded to book length; every section has some eye-popping "wait, no, really?" moments. If the idea of orchids parasitizing fungi wasn't strange enough, there's the suspense and dread of finding out they often can only parasitize one species of fungi--or worse, require different specific species at different points of their life-cycle (and things get even more tenuous with orchid hybrids and the fungi that get passed down to them). And all of that is before we even get to pollinators! How do these things even live?
posted by mittens at 11:54 AM on July 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

This is an excellent, excellent little article!

McCormick describes it this way: “The pollinator comes in, gets tricked, goes ‘Well, dammit, I’m not doing that again,’ and flies off somewhere far away. At which point he gets desperate and gets fooled again. So, your pollen goes a long way and crosses with very genetically distinct individuals. It’s a mechanism for promoting outcrossing.”

Orchids are so subtle and devious I’d be surprised if doesn’t turn out that the orchid is making the pollinators forget their bad experiences — and causing it to fly longer and straighter to boot, possibly.

Vanilla pods come from an orchid, and apparently we have become the major pollinators.
posted by jamjam at 1:09 PM on July 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh, this is glorious and right up my alley. I just finished Merlin Sheldrake’s “Entangled Life” which has many more “wait, what!?” moments and lots of discussion of why we need to re-think species and intelligence and what constitutes a singular organism and an organism that has like 48 possible gender states.
posted by Silvery Fish at 1:36 PM on July 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

And here I am, restarting my Nero Wolfe reading.
posted by doctornemo at 2:08 PM on July 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Thanks for posting. I am a backyard gardener, and I really enjoyed this essay.

Not only is it filled with ‘how about that?’ orchid and fungi facts, but the author assumes the reader doesn’t have a science background. Everything was explained without talking down to the audience.

Good stuff.
posted by AMyNameIs at 3:46 PM on July 5, 2023

Orchids are so weird.
posted by leotrotsky at 6:42 AM on July 6, 2023

Fantastic, thank you! If I ever was really rich I would have an orchid room like Nero Wolfe - except I would hire someone to do most of the work. I enjoyed Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy by Eric Hansen.
posted by blue shadows at 12:09 AM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]