I was reading a funny blog entry that brought me to tears. The headline was “Bees Tricked By Tranny Orchids”. (Prepare yourself for graphic language.) Now anyone would be intrigued by the title alone. Though the entry was short, it was direct to the point and yes, TRUE.

If you haven’t heard, orchids have evolved enough to use sex to pollinate. This phenomenon is a rarity in the orchid world. Deception is a fairly common tactic to use when pollinating. In fact around a third of the orchid population also uses deception to pollinate. Most of them use food-deceptive methods. And amongst the 30,000 known orchid species, only approximately 1,000 of them uses sex to lure insects into doing their deed.

The funnier thing about this is that the sexual-deceptive methods are apparently more effective than their food counterpart. Because the orchids only target specific insects, for example a bee, what happens is that the bee falls on the same pattern of being fooled by the same species of orchid. The bees directly go from one orchid to another (of the same kind) leaving the pollens previously attached to it, while deception using food reward offers little certainty of successful pollination.

Since there are a lot of plants using food to spread their pollen, most of them are lost from the transfer. Moreover, the pollen is not taken to the correct flowers or species. So the pollen is either dropped or taken to the incorrect plants. Thus, in hindsight mimicking a female insect is the sure way to go, since a fly will never mate with a bee.

Maybe amongst all flowers, orchids have evolved to be champions of pollination. Another weird thing about this occurrence is that it seems that only male insects are targeted. Although there is currently no explanation why this is, a lot of research is putting more time into studying this puzzling strategy of pollination.

The specificity of this technique ensures that the longevity of their species lives on. Now to call these amazing plants slutty (as the aforementioned blog post did) because of what they do, is just plain wrong. I think innovative is a more appropriate term to use to describe their oh-so funny way of procreation.

What are your thoughts on this trickery? Please leave a comment below.

Can’t get enough about orchid reproduction? Here’s how you can propagate your orchids also.