SUNDEW (Drosera roraimae)

Just call it the flypaper plant. The drosera, found throughout the world, features long leaves with tentacles sticky with nectar, digestive enzymes, and adhesive. Attracted by the nectar, visiting insects find themselves literally glued to the spot. Additional tentacles then move in to anchor the struggling insect. At times, the entire leaf will surround it. Once sure of its prey, the plant sends the digestive enzymes into action. Bug eaten, the leaves open again, releasing the insect’s shell to the wind. In the Lost World, the sundew lives on the tepuis’ surface, where it can soak up the maximum sunlight its multiple flowers — sometimes up to 50 per plant stem — require.

SUN PITCHER (Heliamphora)

A tepuis native, sun pitchers live for bugs. As rain fills the pitcher, the plant’s sides begin to curve in towards its upper section. The section, known as a bell, features a slippery surface that forces unwitting insects attracted by the pitcher’s red nectar stem to fall into the water below. Those bugs that don’t manage to fly out before hitting the water are absorbed through plant bacteria. When temperatures are moderate (61 to 80° F) with damp, humid atmospheric conditions, the sun pitcher flourishes in five species: Heliamphora heterodoxa (olive green, with a red line on the rim and pink and white flowers); Heliamphora ionasi (features a large red nectar spoon and can stand up to 18 inches tall); Heliamphora minor (at three inches tall, the smallest species); Heliamphora nutans, and Heliamphora tatei.

BROMELIADS

Though a relative of the pineapple, the tepuis’ two bromeliad species are more pitcher plant knock-offs than tropical fruit. The bromeliads use the same techniques as the pitcher plant to attract their bugs, but also will take in decaying organic matter and dust. They can be found on rocks or tree limbs. The tepuis bromeliads’ talent for insect digestion is not shared by other bromeliads elsewhere — it’s an attribute essential for survival in terra tepui.

ORCHIDS

Tepuis country is an orchid lover’s paradise. As one orchid tourist to the Lost World recalls in his Web journal, “We were approaching nirvana.” An estimated 500 species grow throughout Canaima National Park. Here, orchids are almost a casual wildflower and grow effortlessly on leaves, rocks, trees, sand, and soil. Some clusters can be found growing up to 6.5 feet tall. One native favored by the Pemón for decoration is the Cattelaya jenmanii, found at altitudes between 1,312 and 3,280 feet in the Roraima area of Bolivar State and in Guyana. Horticulturalists temporarily lost track of this purple orchid for 63 years until it was reidentified in 1969. BLADDERWORT (Utricularia)

Another insectivorous plant, bladderworts like the Urticularia humboldtii (named after 19th century explorer Alexander Humboldt) favor the tepuis summit where they can get steady sun. Their roots prefer cool, boggy land. Their flowers are usually violet with a sunny orange center. Found on Mount Roraima, this bladderwort digests insects via the “bladders” on its aquatic roots. The Utricularia humboldtii is the largest of the bladderworts and is prized by horticulturalists for its beauty.

Hungry for greens? The Pemón say sucking on the leaves of this fan-shaped plant could keep you alive for weeks:

Stegolepis

Chimantaea cinerea

Heliamphora

Drosera roraimae

If you’re thinking of walking off with a pitcher plant or plucking a rosy orchid as a tropical keepsake, think again. Only the Pemón have an official right to gather vegetation grown on the Gran Sabana.

Producer
RONNIE GODEANU

Art Director
SABINA DALEY

Designers
LENNY DROZNER
KAREN MATTSON
RADIK SHVARTS

Pagebuilding
BRIAN SANTALONE

Writer
DAVID MALAKOFF

Production Artist
RUIYAN XU

Technical Director
BRIAN LEE

Content Consultant
GIANNA SAVOIE

About the Writer

David Malakoff is a journalist covering research discoveries and the politics of science for SCIENCE MAGAZINE in Washington, D.C. His writing has appeared in a wide range of venues, including THE ECONOMIST, THE WASHINGTON POST, and ABCNews.com.

Thirteen Online is a production of Thirteen/WNET New York’s Kravis Multimedia Education Center in New York City. Anthony Chapman, Director of Interactive & Broadband. Bob Adleman, Business Manager. Carmen DiRienzo, Vice President and Managing Director, Corporate Affairs.

Television Credits

Narrated by
Stockard Channing

Producer
Mark Flowers

Photographed and Directed by
Tim Shepherd

Additional Photography
Phil Ball

Editor
Andrew Chastney

Dubbing Editor
Angela Groves

Dubbing Mixer
Peter Hicks

On-Line Editor
Steve Olive

Graphics
Sarah Grigg

Scientific Consultants:
Dr. Hans Banziger
Dr. Philip Cribb
Dr. Robert Dressler
Dr. Dora Emilia Mora De Retana
Professor Hannes Paulus

Production Co-Ordinator
Lea Aldridge

The BBC wishes to thank:
B.B.O.N.T.
Bangkok Flower Centre
Sandra Bell
Burnham Nurseries
Peter Corkill
Julio Cormones
Thoswan Devakul
Rodolfo Dodero
Kerri Dressler
English Nature
Eric Young Orchid Foundation
Greenaway Orchids
Claire Hermans
Johan Hermans
Apichart Jitnuyanond
Kent Wildlife Trust
Lankester Botanical Gardens
Alan Moon
Malcolm Perry Orchids
Margaret Ramsay
Ratcliffe Orchids
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
The Royal Horticultural Society
Universidad De Costa Rica

Unit Managers
Christina Hamilton
Sally Mark

Series Editor
Neil Nightingale

For NATURE

Narration written by
Janet Hess

Coordinating Producer
Janice Young

Producer
Jill Clarke

Associate Producer
Patty Jacobson

Researchers
Gianna Scaralia
Susane Lee

Production Assistant
Erika Haendel

Production Secretary
Irene Tejaratchi

Manager
Eileen Fraher

Production Manager
Julie Schapiro Thorman

Editor
Patrick Gambuti, Jr.

On-Line Editor
Barry Gliner

Audio Mix
Ed Campbell

Additional sequences directed by
Fred Kaufman

Director of Photography
William Rexer II

Assistant Camera
Jonathan Furmanski
Kipjaz Savoie

Sound
Mark Roy
Brad Bergbom

Still photography provided by
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
The Luesther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, New York
Moreno Tagliapietra
Dorothy Cherbavaz

Special Thanks to:
Vancouver Orchid Society
Vancouver Trade And Convention Center
Wally Thomas
Stan Logan
Jean Clark
Joan Walton
Dirk Oertel
Cordelia Head
J&L; Orchids
Don Herman
Juan Carlos Uribe
Alex Hirtz
Jim Ash
Skip Blanchard, Ph.D.
Eric Lamont, Ph.D.
Dave Taft
Luther Travis
Moreno Tagliapietra
Dorothy Cherbavaz
Gustavo A. Romero, Ph.D., F.L.S.
Lisa Decesare
Harvard University Herbaria , Cambridge, Ma
Supervising Producer
Bill Murphy
Executive In Charge
William Grant

Executive Producer
Fred Kaufman

A Co-Production of Thirteen/WNET And BBC-TV

This program was produced by Thirteen/WNET New York, which is solely responsible for its content.

OrchidWeb
http://orchidweb.org/
A comprehensive guide to everything orchid from the American Orchid Society.

All About Orchids
http://www.orchid.org.uk/
Answers to every question you were afraid to ask, from George and Shiela Barnes.

The Orchid Photo Page
http://www.orchidworks.com/
Over 200 stunning photos, plus “What if They Mated?,” an interactive hybrid demonstration.

Susan Orlean
http://www.susanorlean.com/
Web site of THE ORCHID THIEF author.

The Orchid House
http://retirees.uwaterloo.ca/~jerry/orchids/
A site for the “undisputed champions” of the flower world.

Books

Darwin, Charles. THE VARIOUS CONTRIVANCES BY WHICH ORCHIDS ARE FERTILIZED BY INSECTS. New York: New York University Press, 1988.

Hansen, Eric. ORCHID FEVER: A HORTICULTURAL TALE OF LOVE, LUST, AND LUNACY. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000.

Orlean, Susan. THE ORCHID THIEF. New York: Random House, 1999.

Pridgeon, Alec. THE ILLUSTRATED ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ORCHIDS. Portland, OR: Timber Press, 1992.

Romero, Gustavo A. A HISTORY OF THE ORCHID. Portland, OR: Timber Press, 1995.

In 1994, NEW YORKER magazine writer Susan Orlean traveled to Florida to cover a most unusual trial — and ended up becoming entangled in the wondrous and sometimes treacherous world of orchids. The result is THE ORCHID THIEF: A TRUE STORY OF BEAUTY AND OBSESSION (Random House, 1998).

Orlean tells the story of orchid fancier-turned defendant John Laroche, who hoped to parlay an armful of rare orchids taken from a protected swamp into a fortune by selling the flowers to impassioned collectors. Along the way, THE ORCHID THIEF offers a delightful history of the orchid trade, modern stories of intrigue among orchid growers, and Orlean’s own quest to find the elusive ghost orchid. The story proved so fascinating that Hollywood came calling, bringing the book to the big screen in the quirky film ADAPTATION featuring Chris Cooper as Laroche and Meryl Streep as Orlean.

Author Susan Orlean.

Orlean knew little about orchids before starting work on the book and even now insists that “I’m not an orchid expert.” But after months of wandering through swamps and orchid shows, she says she understands the flower’s powerful draw. “People with wildly different tastes converge on this fascination,” she says, with some fixated on their often garish colors and others “fascinated with categorizing orchids and figuring out their pedigrees.”

Still others take pride in getting the plants, which can take years to grow from seed, to bloom. “They have this mystique for being temperamental,” she says. “Now, getting a rose to bloom is not inconsequential, but people don’t celebrate it the way they do when an orchid blooms. You just have a different relationship with an orchid than with a rose. Orchids are plants that people can have in their homes, year round, regardless of climate. So raising orchids is not about gardening, it’s more like animal husbandry.”

Even Orlean has been bitten — just a bit — by the orchid bug. Several of the plants now adorn her apartment. “I have to admit, I rather like them,” she says. “They are blooming, so I feel like a genius. And they look great in my apartment.”

Nor is she devastated by her failure to find a blooming ghost orchid, a rare Florida species that was the object of Laroche’s desire and eventually her own. “It would be really interesting to see,” she says. “I was crushed and exasperated when I couldn’t find one. But then it sort of dawned on me that I can live without it. I’ve sort of moved on.”

Still, she is curious to find out what happens to a flask of baby ghost orchids a fan gave her, which she turned over to a botanical garden in New York. A curator recently called and said that the plants were beginning to mature. “I’ll probably go over and see how they are doing,” she admits. But, she adds, “I am not a person who is very inclined to get hooked.”

From corsages for the high school prom to showy centerpieces for formal dinner tables, colorful orchids are in big demand. As a result, orchid culture has taken off over the last few decades, as growers using new techniques have learned to scale up production, churning out millions of genetically identical plants through a process called cloning.

As NATURE’s Obsession with Orchids shows, cloning allows breeders to turn one plant into thousands, by harvesting a few cells from root tips and growing them in carefully prepared petri dishes. As the clump of tissue grows, breeders can divide it into separate plants, dramatically reducing production costs. As a result, orchids that were once a sign of wealth have become available to almost everyone.

One beneficial side effect of the orchid boom is reduced pressure on wild populations from collectors, who once were primary suppliers to plant shops and collectors. That doesn’t mean overcollecting isn’t a problem in some cases: wild populations of Vietnam’s rare lady slipper orchid, for instance, may have recently succumbed to overzealous pickers. But in most cases the major threat to orchids comes from habitat destruction.

Many researchers are cloning orchids.

In the United States, for instance, the western prairie fringed orchid is threatened by the loss of intact prairies and pesticide use. The flower may grow up to four feet tall and have up to two dozen creamy white fringed flowers. Its pollinator, the long-tongued hawk moth, comes by night, attracted by an intoxicating scent. The moth “is unremarkable in appearance and coloration,” says Kathy Martin, a botanist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Bismarck, ND. “What’s unusual about it is its uniquely evolved tongue for harvesting the orchid’s nectar.” As the moth hovers with its long tongue extended into the orchid, two specialized pollen-bearing structures brush pollen onto the insect’s eyes.

But today, only 2 percent of America’s tallgrass prairie remains, along with less than 40 percent of the original western prairie fringed orchid populations, Martin says. And pesticides drifting from nearby cropland pose a threat to hawkmoths. As a result, the orchid was listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act in 1989 — making it one of nearly 2,000 endangered orchids worldwide.

Luckily, the growing interest in greenhouse orchids has also translated into greater interest in conservation. In the case of the prairie fringed orchid, conservationists are working to establish hawkmoth “corridors” of native prairie between orchid populations. And in isolated orchid preserves tens or even hundreds of miles apart, they are considering pollinating the flowers by hand. In the end, they hope that such human “flower power” will pay off with survival.

NATURE explores why many creatures — humans included — seem to have an Obsession with Orchids.

No flowering plant has captured the attention of humans, or stirred their passions, in quite the way that orchids have. In past ages, orchids — in all their 20,000 or so wild varieties — have been hunted and collected in almost every part of the world. Today, millions of people remain devoted to the plant and its exotically beautiful “faces.” NATURE looks at the human fascination with these strangely compelling flowers in Obsession with Orchids.

The program was filmed in such diverse locations as Thailand, Majorca, Central America, the Caribbean, England, and the United States, and at the 1999 World Orchid Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, where enthusiasts from all walks of life gathered under the spell of an astonishing variety of the flowers from nearly every part of the planet.

To order a copy of Obsession with Orchids, please visit the NATURE Shop.
Online content for Obsession with Orchids was originally posted April 2000.

Pity the poor solitary bees that make their home on the sunny Mediterranean island of Majorca. Each spring, the males emerge from their underground lairs in eager search of a mate. Some find love with another buzzer, but others are made to look like fools — by a flower. Majorca’s beautiful bee orchid blossoms look and smell just like a ready-for-hugging honey, and lure the excited males in for repeated bouts of frenzied, but fruitless, mating. The frustrated bees eventually give up, but not before the plants — specially designed to glue their pollen sacs onto the insects’ legs — have tricked the bees into unknowingly carrying the pollen from one flower to another.

The bee orchid isn’t the only orchid to drive admirers crazy. These unusual flowers, the subject of NATURE’s Obsession with Orchids have long captivated human admirers, too. Fittingly, in fact, Obsession with Orchids opens at an annual international orchid show, where thousands of flower fanciers have gathered, eager to get a look at the latest and showiest flowers created by orchid breeders. Indeed, while there are an estimated 30,000 kinds of wild orchids around the world, mostly in the tropics, human breeders have created many more hybrids over the last few hundred years. Like the solitary bees, people seem powerless to resist the orchid’s magic spell. “People get very passionate about orchids; they just seem to get hooked,” says NEW YORKER magazine writer Susan Orlean, author of THE ORCHID THIEF, a page-turning tale of the orchid’s remarkable history, biology, and one man’s obsession with the flowers.

Orchids captivate both animals and humans.

As Obsession with Orchids shows, the flowers do have a colorful history. A century ago, adventurers often died during daring collecting journeys into jungles and swamps, in search of new and captivating species to sell to eager buyers. And it took gardeners centuries to unlock the secret of getting orchids to grow and flower in the greenhouse. The secret? Orchid seeds only germinate when exposed to a special fungus that growers can replicate with a gelatinous mixture of sugar and nutrients. Today, as a result of this and other discoveries, orchid culture is a billion-dollar global enterprise with millions of customers.

The buyers aren’t beguiled just by the orchid’s many shapes, sizes, and colors. Some are fascinated by the flower’s sex life, which often features the drama of desire and deception. Over millions of years, orchids have evolved remarkable ways of attracting, and sometimes entrapping, birds and insects. The bucket orchid Coryanthes, for instance, lures in male euglossine bees with a perfumed oil the bees need to attract mates. As Obsession with Orchids shows, it’s hard for the bees to gain a foothold on the slippery substance, and they eventually fall into a pool of the slimy fluid. There is only one way out — a tight-fitting channel the bee must squeeze through to escape. And when he does, the orchid secretly glues two plump pods of pollen onto the bee’s back, which will be removed when he falls into another flower’s pool of desire.

Other orchids have evolved similarly tortuous traps. Some attract flies by smelling like dead meat. Then, once the fly lands, it uses a kind of trap door to drop the fly into a pollen chamber with only one exit. To attract butterflies, some orchids use another trick — mimicking the color and shape of nearby flowers favored by the flutterers. But unlike those flowers, the fake butterfly orchids offer no nectar to the visiting insects, and simply use them to spread their pollen from flower to flower. Still other orchids appear to be an enemy to a pollinating insect — prompting an attack that allows the flower, once again, to give its pollen a free ride.

A butterfly is one of an orchid’s collaborators.

Such unusual pollination schemes have long entranced biologists. The great evolutionist Charles Darwin was so taken with the flowers that in 1877 he published a thick book devoted to THE VARIOUS CONTRIVANCES BY WHICH ORCHIDS ARE FERTILISED BY INSECTS. In it, he noted that some orchids appear to rely on just one specific pollinator — a particular species of moth, for instance — for survival. Modern researchers call this specialized biological embrace of two species “co-evolution.” But co-evolution has both benefits and risks. The benefit is that both partners can specialize and don’t have to waste energy finding other ways to reproduce. The peril is becoming too reliant on a single partner. If one half of the co-evolved pair becomes extinct, the other is surely doomed as well.

Darwin’s insights into co-evolution allowed him to foretell the discovery of a new species. In a famous example, he described an orchid from Madagascar that had a foot-deep nectar well that kept the sweet liquid far out of reach of all known butterflies and moths. But the existence of the flower led him to predict the existence of a specialized moth with a foot-long proboscis that, like a straw, could reach the deep reward. Indeed, after Darwin’s death, researchers discovered just such an insect, and named it the “Predicta moth” in honor of Darwin’s educated guess.

The Predicta moth won’t be the last orchid-related discovery. Even today, researchers and flower breeders are combing the world in search of both new understanding and new examples of what Darwin called “my beloved Orchids.”