The weird sex life of orchids
'...Let us celebrate some other pinnacles of evolution, the kind that would get a lot more press if natural history were written by plants rather than animals. I'm thinking specifically of one of the largest, most diverse families of flowering plants: the 25,000 species of orchids that, over the past 80 million years, have managed to colonise six continents and almost every conceivable terrestrial habitat, from remote Mediterranean mountaintops to living rooms the world over. The secret of their success? In a word, sex. But not exactly normal sex. Really weird sex, in fact.
a wild hybrid orchid, whose pollinator, a male solitary bee, is engaged here in pseudocopulation.
Hoping to observe some of this plant sex, the photographer Christian Ziegler and I recently journeyed to one of those remote Mediterranean mountains in search of one of the most ingenious and diabolical of these orchids: the Ophrys, or, as it is sometimes called, the bee orchid. (Some botanists, less politely, call it the prostitute orchid.) I'd been eager to lay eyes on this orchid and meet its hapless pollinator ever since reading about its reproductive strategy, which involves what my field guide called "sexual deception" and "pseudocopulation." What I learned forced me to revise radically my estimation of what a clever plant is capable of doing to a credulous animal.
In the case of this particular Ophrys, that animal is a relative of the bumblebee. The orchid offers the bee no nectar reward or pollen meal; rather, it seduces the male bee with the promise of bee sex, then ensures its pollination by frustrating the desire it has excited. The orchid accomplishes its sexual deception by mimicking the appearance, scent, and even tactile experience of a female bee. The flower, in other words, traffics in something very much like metaphor..' Read more:
