There's a flower that grows in Australia, and for various reasons, only in Australia. The Latin name is caleana major, and it's more commonly known as the flying duck orchid. You can see why. The blooms really do look like ducks in flight.
The flying duck orchid is thought to have evolved to look that way in order to tempt in male sawflies by making them believe that they are female sawflies. Do female sawflies resemble miniature ducks? Not even a little, at least not according to our stereoscopic eyes. Obviously fly vision is a little different.
Another strange thing is that the flower needs to trick these insects into pollinating it. We're used to social insects that will voluntarily do the job.
2 comments:
You're right that the flying duck orchid looks nothing like a sawfly. So I got curious about what was meant by the male sawflies thinking the orchids might be females of the species. When I looked a bit further I came across the term pseudocopulation, a word that indicates tricking the insect with chemicals that smell like female sawflies. However, I'm not sure just how close you'd have to be to get a good sniff of one of them.
As for looks they are very pretty flowers, albeit quite small and yes, very like tiny flying ducks. I always enjoyed reading about orchids in the Rex Stout novels as well as looking up their images on the internet now we have that option. What I never felt like doing was trying to grow them myself. It's a far too complicated business. It sounds like growing flying duck orchids is even more complicated than that.
While we have decent olfactory systems, our sense of smell wouldn't pick up on the same things that a sawfly does. It's just attuned to different kinds of stimuli, plus we're a lot bigger. Of course given what these male sawflies are doing, what pseudocopulation actually entails, it's easy to say that this is one of those cases where ignorance really is bliss.
I think there's a pretty strong implication that even Nero Wolfe wouldn't have had much success growing orchids on his own. Theodore Horstman appears to draw a pretty hefty salary for keeping them healthy. Flying duck orchids only grow naturally in Australia. There might be a way to recreate the needed conditions artificially, but I don't know. The tradeoffs involved in indoor versus outdoor growing would keep most would-be cultivators out of the game.
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