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RappNature
Sara and Jim Lawrey
Rappnature@aol.com
This isn’t the way we were taught to view plant-pollinator systems. Aren’t they supposed to be good for both partners, cooperative and mutually beneficial? But just as with business partners, plant-pollinator partners sometimes cheat each other. This is certainly true of bee pollinators that steal nectar without entering the flower or transferring pollen. Deception in lady’s slippers is simply a plant’s way of doing the same sort of thing.
There’s no free lunch* in nature or anywhere else, and there’s always a price to pay for taking short-cuts. In the case of lady’s slipper orchids the cost comes in alarmingly high fruiting failures. Pollinators visit flowers only once, learn to avoid the deception and never visit again. As a result, flowers rarely produce fruits with seeds.
Professor Douglas Gill at the University of Maryland has studied populations of pink lady’s slipper orchids for nearly 30 years, carefully marking and recording the location, size and fruiting success of around 2500 plants. He’s found that plants take a long time to reach maturity and then usually flower erratically. Of the few that flower only two percent set seed. Artificial pollination produces nearly 100 percent fruiting success, so Gill attributes the failures to pollinator limitation. He estimates that in northeastern North America over 90 percent of the flowering pink lady’s slipper orchids fail to fruit each year, a surprisingly high cost of cheating in these plants. ‘
If it’s so costly why do so many orchids cheat? One theory is that the tremendous payoff of a single fruiting event makes the gamble worth the risk. In the case of pink lady’s slippers,
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