The week of July fourth, the long-awaited event happened- the orchids opened up and flowered! I've spent a lot of time since then visiting orchids that were known to be flowering this year and counting the number of pollinia that have been taken. Pollinia are sacs of pollen that the orchid flowers have at their entrance so that anybody wishing to drink nectar will pick up these sticky capsules, bringing them to the next flower they visit.
A flowering round-leaved orchid in watershed 1. The red arrows point to pollinia.
I have been using the number of pollinia missing from the flower spike as an indicator of how much pollinator activity an orchid is experiencing this season. I hope to be able to relate this to factors such as spike height, the number of flowers produced by the plant and the distance to nearest flowering neighbor. This will tell us whether orchids benefit from having neighbors, and whether growing taller and producing more flowers increases their chances of pollination.
The other part of my orchid project has to do with motion-activated cameras which I placed on orchids to try and capture a sight of their elusive pollinator! Unfortunately this didn't pan out like I had hoped although I did get this picture of what may be a bat?
A long-eared bat?
None of my cameras picked up any pollinators, so that was disappointing. The orchid pollinator remains a mystery for now! Hopefully as I start analyzing my data, some other interesting things will come from my project.
Jill