Orchid Flower Heads

Orchid Flower Heads

“Help thou mine unbelief”?

This is from a documentary I saw on PBS a few years ago.

“The Australian hammer orchid has taken advantage of a mating ritual of the Thynnid wasp, which involves a female wasp waiting on top of a branch or plant for a male to spot her. The hammer orchid's flower mimics the female wasp looking upward for a male flying by, complete with a fake shiny head and furry body. The orchid even releases an enticing female wasp pheromone.”

The development of this and 10,000 other flowers that lure insects is explained through evolution. I can understand how natural selection could promote this flower over one without a wasp pheromone. I can understand how mutation could change the smell or shape of the flower so that after 10 million years we have thousands of different flowers that evolved from one. What I can’t believe is how any of this can explain how a flower could end up looking and smelling like a bee that can lure real bees to transfer pollen.

Help me understand.

First, realize that wasp vision isn't the same as ours, and that you don't know a lot about what does and doesn't "look like" a wasp TO a wasp.

Second, the first flower that resembled a wasp may have done so very, very vaguely. That is, a slight mutation to how the flower looked was enough to attract a little more wasp attention.

This helped that plant reproduce more successfully than similar plants.

Over time, other mutations occurred; the ones that increased the resemblance to wasps helped that plant reproduce more successfully, thus, spreading that mutation.

Finally, the hardest thing to understand is how long a time millions of years really is. It's hundreds of thousands of generations.

Big numbers are hard for us to grasp.

I strongly recommend Stephen Jay Gould, especially his "Reflections on Natural History" series -- the first of which, Ever Since Darwin, has an essay about a clam that has a body part that mimics a fish -- he explicitly discusses how this striking resemblance was the result of the same kind of story I told above (but he tells it better).

Another really good book for understanding evolution is The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins -- the whole purpose of the book is to make evolution intelligible to the layman.

There are also web sites that discuss evolution.

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/

U.C. Berkeley's website on evolution, and

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/evolution

is New Scientists web site (it's a UK science news publication).

It IS hard to grasp -- it took me quite a while to understand it as well as I do, which isn't all that well, really. And I'm fairly smart at learning things. It takes a while of learning the details, and thinking about it, for it to really begin to stick.

But it's fascinating and very fun to learn about.

What can I use to hang delicate orchid flower heads from a string to without damaging them?

They will be dried preserved flower heads...I want to hang them from string, a couple of inches apart.

razor wire

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