Free The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean

Various Contrivances By Which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects
. In one chapter he described a strange orchid he had found in Madagascar—an
Angraecum sesquipedale
with waxy white star-shaped flowers and “a green whip-like nectary of astonishing length.” The nectary was almost twelve inches long and all of the nectar was in the bottom inch. Darwin hypothesized that there had to be an insect that could eat the unreachable nectar and at the same time fertilize the plant—otherwise the species couldn’t exist. Such an insect would have to have a complementarily strange shape. He wrote: “In Madagascar there
must
be moths with proboscis capable of extension to a length of ten to twelve inches! This belief of mine has been ridiculed by some entomologists, but we now know from Fritz Müller that there is a sphinx-moth in South Brazil which has a proboscis of nearly sufficient length, for when dried it was between ten and eleven inches long. When not protruded the proboscis is coiled up into a spiral of at least twenty windings … some huge moth with a wonderfully long proboscis could drain the last drop of nectar. If such great moths were to become extinct in Madagascar, assuredly the
Angraecum
would become extinct.” Darwin was very interested in how orchids released pollen. He experimented by poking them with needles, camel-hair brushes, bristles, pencils, and his fingers. He discovered that parts were so sensitivethat they released pollen upon the slightest touch, but that “moderate degrees of violence” on the less sensitive parts had no effect, which he concluded meant that the orchid wouldn’t release pollen haphazardly—it was smart enough to save it for only the most favorable encounters with bugs. He wrote: “Orchids appeared to have been modelled in the wildest caprice, but this is no doubt due to our ignorance of their requirements and conditions of life. Why do Orchids have so many perfect contrivances for their fertilisation? I am sure that many other plants offer analogous adaptatior’s of high perfection; but it seems that they are really more numerous and perfect with the Orchideae than with most other plants.”
    —
    The schemes orchids use to attract a pollinator are elegant but low-percentage. Botanists recently studied one thousand wild orchids for fifteen years, and during that time only twenty-three plants were pollinated. The odds are bad, but orchids compensate. If they are ever fertilized, they will grow a seedpod that is supercharged. Most other species of flowers produce only twenty or so seeds at a time, while orchid pods may be filled with millions and millions of tiny dust-sized seeds. One pod has enough seeds to supply the world’s prom corsages for the rest of eternity.
    Some species of orchids grow in the ground and others don’t live in soil at all. The ones that don’t grow in soil are called epiphytes, and they live their lives attached to a tree branch or a rock. Epiphytic orchid seeds settle in a comfortable spot, sprout, grow, dangle their roots in the air, and live a lazy life absorbing rainwater and decayed leaves and light. They aren’t parasites—they give nothing to the tree and get nothing from it except a good place to sit. Most epiphytes evolved in tropical jungles, where there are so many livingthings competing for room on the jungle floor that most species lose the fight and die out. Orchids thrived in the jungle because they developed the ability to live on air rather than soil and positioned themselves where they were sure to get light and water—high above the rest of the plants on the branches of trees. They thrived because they took themselves out of competition. If all of this makes orchids seem smart—well, they
do
seem smart. There is something clever and un-plantlike about their determination to survive and their knack for useful deception and their genius for seducing human beings for hundreds and hundreds of years.
    Orchids grow slowly. They