Orchids: The Smartest Plants in the World (2024)

PublishedDecember 23, 2014 at 4:02 PM EST

Orchids are sometimes called "the smartest plants in the world" because of their ingenious ability to trick insects and people into helping with their pollination and transport. But many of the 25,000 known species of orchids are threatened or endangered, and Dennis Whigham and colleagues at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center are investigating why. The scientists are also trying to bring these dinosaur-era plants back.

It’s a cold winter day, and I’m out exploring an old forest of oaks, tulip poplars and beech trees.

I’m hunting for orchids with Dennis Whigham, senior botanist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Maryland. Many of the 25,000 known species of orchids are threatened or endangered, in part because their complex lifecycle is vulnerable to disruptions caused by development.

So Whigham and his colleagues are trying to save these dinosaur-era plants. Now, you might find it odd that we would be out looking for plants in the dead of winter.

But soon we find purple-spotted leaves erupting from a rotting log. These crain fly orchids only grow their leaves when the plants around them are bare.

“What’s interesting about this orchid is that it is what you call wintergreen," Whigham said. "If you were to come here in the summer, you wouldn’t see this plant. It has no leaves. And we think that’s because this forest is very shady in the summer. And so if you are an orchid, it might not be a bad idea to have your leaf out whenever there aren’t a lot of leaves on the trees, because you get more sunlight.”

It is this ability to outwit other life forms that makes orchids what Whigham calls the smartest plants in the world. Some orchids have adapted their flowers to look like insects—which fools bugs into trying to mate with them. Other orchids spread their pollen by exuding a perfume of rotting meat, which attracts flies.

Whigham explains that the life of these beautifully clever plants is dependent on death. The roots of orchids draw their nutrients from fungi, which consume dead and rotting plant matter.

We hike back to his lab at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, located about a half an hour south of Annapolis.

“There are threatened and endangered orchids in every state in the country, in every province of Canada," Whigham said."And in fact one of our research projects is focused on the most endangered plant in Eastern North America, which happens to be an orchid. It’s called the Small Whorled Pogonia.”

These orchids look like green pinwheels with dragon head flowers. They are extinct in Maryland. Whigham’s lab supervisor, Jay O’Neill, shows me a glass vial holding their tiny, hairlike seeds. Whigham’s team is trying to bring them back, as scientists might try to hatch dinosaur eggs in a science fiction movie.

Researcher Melissa McCormick uses this machinery to analyze the DNA of orchid roots, to figure out which orchids need which fungi. They have tried everything to get the seeds to germinate – bathing them with sugars, vitamins, hormones, even bleach.

But they can’t get the seeds to grow because they can’t yet figure out how to grow in the lab a particular kind of red-capped mushroom fungi the orchids need.

One theory is that disturbance of old forests – either through suburban development, logging or invasive species – disrupts fungal communities in the soil in ways that might take decades to heal. Without the right mix of fungi and tree roots, orchids can not live.

Cutting forests can trigger a cascade of subtle problems that people do not even see – or think about for generations. It is an interdependence that runs like a spinal cord through nature.