Hammer Orchids

[mishalak]

There are orchids that unlike most other flower do not play nice with their pollinators. Instead of rewarding them for their service they fool them into it with tricks and traps. This cruel mimicry often takes the form of sexual enticement of insects. Frequently people speak of a perfect deception on the part of this orchid. But looking at a picture of an actual Hammer Orchid flower makes one wonder how the male insect gets fooled effectively enough to get the pollination job done and how this ever got started in the first place.

The answer probably can found in the similarities to a spam I recently received. This spam seemed to come from a male looking for another male and apologizing for not writing back sooner. It struck a very fine balance between being vague and being specific and didn't use any of the obvious "come ons" that I've seen in the past. Indeed I was fooled into thinking I'd written to someone and forgotten so I went to look at his picture album. Even that didn't obviously give the game away by having porn star pictures or something. But if you tried to see more of "his pictures" it asked you to sign up for a free "Global Male Pass". I never sign up for anything so I wasn't enticed into doing what the spammer wanted, but I could see where someone would be fooled. And this is a sort of evolution of a simple trick into a much more subtle one.

Most people around the internet have received sexual "come on" spam. But having been on the web a while people are mostly more savvy than they were. Perhaps the spammers take some thought in designing their traps, but I think a lot of them just throw out anything and see what works. Each successive spam is built upon what has worked in the past.

So it is with the deceptive orchids. They probably started out with a simple broad pheromone that worked enough. But the insects evolved to be slightly smarter about this over time and so fewer orchids would get pollinated. But the orchids eventually happened upon a new variation that got the bees, wasps, or whatever back to doing what they wanted. Today we only see the end product of this evolution so we're amazed at the levels to the trick and how much a flower can look like a "whatever". But on some level we wonder how they get fooled and the answer is much like spam, often they don't. Bee orchids in Europe only manage to fool male solitary and bumble bees often enough to get pollinated 10% of the time. Mostly bees that are fooled once don't ever come back. But since they produce so many seeds even getting pollinated just 10% of the time is enough to ensure the species continues.

Comments

[bovil.livejournal.com]

Insects see UV wavelengths that we don't and aren't sensitive to some of the color wavelengths we see. The orchid doesn't have to worry about looking like a bug to us, just to the right sort of bug.

As to the rest...

I think the bees are smarter about flowers than some people are about spam. Perhaps I should shorten it, though, to "Bees are smarter than some people."

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

That's a big red blob! It looks nothing like a wasp, which we all know are striped yellow and black. [Bug does some Googling] Ah, the Hammer orchid attracts thynnid wasps, whose females are large and wingless and climb up plants to breed. They may well look like the Hammer's deception. They are members of the Tiphiidae family (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiphiidae).

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Well also keep in mind that as soon as there are real females around the Hammer Orchid's trick stops working. It is just in the time between the emergence of the males and the emergence of the females where the orchid gets polinated. So apparently it only looks enough like one to sex starved male thynnid wasps.