Oh not the Orchids
Orchids are something like the plant version of a canary in a coal mine. When the orchids start to disappear from an area, that means there is something seriously wrong with the ecosystem. Unfortunately, disappearances or orchid populations are happening all across North America as pollinator habitat loss leads to lower pollinator populations and subsequently less successful orchid reproduction.
There are 200 orchid species native to North America and more than half of them are endangered. The Smithsonian Institute is currently leading a broad effort to collect and store seeds from every North American orchid species and the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum is joining in.
48 of the 200 native orchid species can be found in Minnesota, including the state flower, the showy lady’s slipper. David Remucal, the curator of endangered plants, and other Arboretum staff are traveling around the state in search of orchids and gathering seeds from every species they can find. Keeping these seeds in a seed bank allows for the preservation of the genetic diversity of these rare plants and could potentially provide opportunity for assisted repopulation in the future. More work has to be done to determine how long certain species’ seeds can be stored and still remain viable. To make things even more complicated, orchids can not simply be grown in soil. While most plant’s seeds contain nutrients that can be used to fuel sprouting, orchid seeds contain only the embryo, no food included. Because of this, orchids must feed on soil fungi to survive. Some species survive for years underground, and only surface to flower and reproduce.
The cryptic, picky nature of these plants makes them particularly difficult to find and even harder to grow, so who’s to know what the future looks like for North American orchids.
Source
Kraker, Dan. 2016. “Their Mission: Save Minnesota’s Rare Orchids Before It’s Too Late”. Mprnews.Org. Accessed November 3 2016. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/10/31/saving-minnesota-rare-orchids-mission-smithsonian.
