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<DIV>Tongue Orchids’ Sexual Guile: Utterly Convincing </NYT_HEADLINE>
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<DIV class=byline>By <A title="More Articles by Carol Kaesuk Yoon"
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/y/carol_kaesuk_yoon/index.html?inline=nyt-per"><FONT
color=#004276>CAROL KAESUK YOON</FONT></A></DIV></NYT_BYLINE>
<DIV class=timestamp>Published: July 15, 2008</DIV>
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<P>Orchids, gorgeous and elegant, are also some of the most deceitful flowers,
having evolved sometimes elaborate ruses to lure pollinators. </P>
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<P class=caption><STRONG>TRICKY</STRONG> Tongue orchids of Australia, excellent
mimics of female wasps. </P></DIV>
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<H2><A href="http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/587532"
target=_blank><FONT color=#004276>Orchid Sexual Deceit Provokes
Ejaculation</FONT></A> (The American Naturalist)</H2></DIV><!--RSS Feed Markup -->
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<P>In a new study of the most brazen of these botanical cheats, the species that
entice pollinators with false promises of sex, scientists have discovered that
one group of orchids has taken the art of manipulation to shameless heights.</P>
<P>Sexually deceptive orchids, as biologists have long known, look and can even
smell so much like a female insect that males will try to mate with the flower
in a sometimes vigorous process that can result in pollination. But scientists
now report that the tongue orchids of Australia are such thoroughly convincing
mimics of female wasps that males not only try to mate with them, but they
actually do mate with them — to the point of ejaculation. </P>
<P>“It’s always been described as pseudocopulation,” said Anne Gaskett, a
graduate student at Macquarie University in Australia and the lead author of the
study. “But it looked like true copulation to me.”</P>
<P>The discovery that orchids can induce such an extreme response is more than
just bizarre natural history, because biologists have always assumed that the
sexual misrepresentations of orchids were harmless to the duped males, no more
than a comical exercise in frustration.</P>
<P>Yet the study, <A
href="http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/587532"
target=_blank><FONT color=#004276>published last month in The American
Naturalist</FONT></A>, suggests a potentially huge cost to the wasps.</P>
<P>“If males waste all their sperm on orchids,” Ms. Gaskett asked, “what have
they got to offer a real female?”</P>
<P>Beyond that, why, scientists asked, would orchids do such an evolutionarily
foolish thing? Why would a flower evolve to compromise the ability of its
pollinator to reproduce?</P>
<P>So many orchids treat their pollinators so nastily, with false promises of
food and sex or the occasional dunking of insect visitors into bucket-shaped
petals full of liquid, that naturalists have puzzled over the relationship for
more than a century. </P>
<P>Darwin was so consumed by the odd interactions that after “The Origin of
Species,” his next book was an entire volume on the subject, “The Various
Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects.”</P>
<P>In the case of the tongue orchids and their dupe wasps, at least, scientists
say they may have deciphered why these flowers abuse their visitors: the
treatment of the wasps may, in fact, be very much to the orchids’ advantage.</P>
<P>In wasps, the sex of an individual, male or female, is determined by a
peculiar genetic system known as haplodiploidy. In this system, females are
produced by an egg from their mother and a sperm from their father. But males
have just half of the genetic complement and are produced by females from just
an egg, without the aid of a male or a single drop of sperm. </P>
<P>For an orchid that is pollinated just by males, depleting sperm that would be
used just to produce females might not be a drawback at all. It could even be a
plus, because some female wasps without sufficient sperm tend to produce more
sons — or, from the orchid’s perspective, more pollinators. </P>
<P>Increasing the numbers of males, scientists say, could even make males a bit
more desperate and less discriminating — another potential advantage for an
orchid trying to fool a male into giving the not-quite-right-looking fake female
sitting immobile inside its petals a
try.</P><NYT_UPDATE_BOTTOM></NYT_UPDATE_BOTTOM></NYT_TEXT>
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<DIV><FONT lang=0 face="Gill Sans MT" size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF"
PTSIZE="10">Laurie Davies Adams<BR>Executive Director<BR><B>Pollinator
Partnership </B><BR>423 Washington Street, 5th floor<BR>San Francisco, CA
94111<BR>415-362-1137<BR>LDA@pollinator.org</FONT><FONT lang=0 face=Arial
color=#000000 size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" PTSIZE="10"><BR><BR></FONT><FONT lang=0
face="Gill Sans MT" color=#0000ff size=4 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" PTSIZE="14"><B><A
href="http://www.pollinator.org/">www.pollinator.org</A></B></FONT><FONT lang=0
face="Gill Sans MT" color=#000000 size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF"
PTSIZE="10"></B><BR><A
href="http://www.nappc.org/">www.nappc.org</A><BR><BR></FONT><FONT lang=0
face="Gill Sans MT" color=#000000 size=3 FAMILY="SANSSERIF"
PTSIZE="12"><B><I>National Pollinator Week is June 22-28, 2008. <BR>Beecome
involved at <A
href="http://www.pollinator.org/">www.pollinator.org</A></I></FONT></B></DIV></FONT><BR><BR><BR><DIV><FONT style="color: black; font: normal 10pt ARIAL, SAN-SERIF;"><HR style="MARGIN-TOP: 10px">Get the scoop on last night's hottest shows and the live music scene in your area - <A title="http://www.tourtracker.com?NCID=aolmus00050000000112" href="http://www.tourtracker.com?NCID=aolmus00050000000112" target="_blank">Check out TourTracker.com</A>!</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>