Orchids: The Masters Of Lying, Cheating & Stealing
Selfish specialization to unique habitats has made orchids successful, diverse, and attractive to humans, but sowed the seeds for their own vulnerability.
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Show Notes
To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
- Mycelium
- Mycorrizhae: a fungus that grows in association with the roots of a plant in a symbiotic or mildly pathogenic relationship.
- Mycoheterotroph: A plant that is completely reliant on fungus for all of its nutrition.
- Sexual deception: A trick used by numerous orchid species of looking and/or smelling like female insects in order to draw male insects to their flowers (for pollination)
- Food deception: Rather than offering pollinators real food rewards (such as nectar or pollen), some orchids merely mimic the looks and smells of other, nearby flowers that offer such rewards.
- Pollinia: In most flowering plants, pollen is a powdery substance made up of tons of individual pollen grains. But orchids pack their grains into a couple of sticky sacks (pollinia) instead.
- Epiphyte: A plant that grows harmlessly upon another plant. Lots of tropical orchids are epiphytes
- Lithophyte: A plant that grows on rocks
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