Ingenious - and insidious - plant strategies
Again from Max Plotkin’s Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice:
“The brown-and-white-mottled Amazonian Gongora orchid produces an intoxicating substance that attracts and befuddles the bee that visits the flower. The orchid is shaped so that the inebriated bee that falls onto a part of the fower, where it both deposits the pollen it carried from another Gongora and picks up new pollen.
“The Gongora’s knockout drop by no means represents the most manipulative nor the most perverse approach to pollination. In the 1984 classic Tropical Nature, entomologist Adrian Forsyth writes that some orchids ‘play on the indiscriminate lust of male tachinid flies by mimicking females.’ From a certain angle, the color patterns of the orchid and its leaf shape resemble the female fly and, according to Forsyth, ‘when the male attempts to copulate with the pseudofemale, he actually pollinates the orchid.’”
