Orchid Deception By Design
Selected passages from the book
Introduction
The word ‘orchid’ comes from the Greek for ‘testicle’. If your only experience of orchids is the extravagant tropical kind, this seems baffling. But for most of Western history, an orchid was a stubby little plant you found in a wet meadow, and if you pulled it up, its pair of rounded tubers left nothing to the imagination. The English called them ‘ballockworts’ and nobody raised an eyebrow.
Chapter 1 — When Orchids Ruled the Earth
If you were to compress the entire history of the Earth into a single 24-hour day, the first life – bacteria – would appear around 3:45 AM. Fish would crawl onto land at about 10:00 PM. The dinosaurs would arrive at 10:45 PM. And orchids? They would show up around 11:31 PM – just in time to watch the asteroid knock the dinosaurs down a peg at 11:39 PM.
Chapter 3 — Darwin’s Contrivances
The male Catasetum flower has two long, hair-trigger antennae that dangle over the lip like a trap waiting to be sprung. When a foraging bee brushes against one of them, the flower fires.
The experience, Darwin noted drily, would be “disagreeable” to the bee. A creator would not, presumably, build a flower that shoots bees. Natural selection would.
Chapter 4 — The Art of Deception
Consider the perspective of a male thynnid wasp in the scrublands of Western Australia. You catch a scent on the warm air – unmistakable – and follow it until you spot her: dark, shiny, perched on a stem. You dive. You land on her back. You grip her thorax and try to lift her into the air. She will not budge. You pull harder. And then, suddenly, you tip over.
You have just been tricked by a hammer orchid. The ‘female’ you tried to abduct was a modified petal – the labellum – shaped, textured, and above all scented to mimic a real female thynnid wasp. And the worst part? You gained absolutely nothing from the exchange. No nectar. No mate. Just a backpack of pollen that you may well carry to the next hammer orchid that fools you.
Chapter 5 — Orchidomania
Benedict Roezl, Czech born, stood 1.88 m (6 feet 2 inches) tall, and had the look of someone built for trouble. Roezl, apparently incapable of self-pity, had a blacksmith fashion a steel hook as a replacement and promptly declared it an improvement on the original.
Bandits concluded that a man who climbed mountains with a steel claw and carried nothing but plants must be either mad or in league with the devil – and let him go rather than find out which.
Chapter 6 — The Smell of Success (and Rotting Flesh)
In 1841, on the French island of Réunion, a twelve-year-old enslaved boy named Edmond Albius figured out how to pollinate vanilla by hand. Every commercially grown vanilla bean in the world is still the result of a human hand performing his delicate technique.
He died in 1880, aged 51, in a public hospital. A local newspaper observed: “It was a destitute and miserable end.”
We frame domestication as something we did to it. One could equally argue that the orchid has simply added Homo sapiens to its roster of exploited partners – after fungi, trees, and insects. The orchid, for its part, has done nothing it was not already doing 90 million years ago. It has merely found a new obliging mark.