Question

Some orchid flowers so closely resemble some female insects that the corresponding male insect is fooled into “mating” with the flower and thus moving pollen between flowers. A.) Explain/describe what type of interaction is this B.)How is this interaction likely to have evolved?

Answer 1

Some orchids use sexual deception.

They produce flowers that look or smell like female insects, usually bees or wasps.

Males are drawn to the sexy flowers and attempt to mate with it.

In doing so, they accidentally collect pollen on their bodies, which fertilizes the next orchid they visit.

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The sexual deception of the elbow orchid:

- Male wasps attracted to odor and appearance of female decoys
- Males grasp female decoys and try to carry them off
- Male wasps pick up pollen packets of orchid for later transfer to another deceptive orchid
- illegitimate signalers can evolve if there is legitimate communication system to exploit
- Plant is exploiting preexisting sensory bias in male wasps which first evolved a sensitivity to appearance and odor of females
- Orchid later mimicked appearance and odor of females via evolution of female decoys.

This interaction could have likely evolved that, Plants require animals (or other interventions) to cross-pollinate, and sexual deception is thought to have evolved from plants that offer food,colour or odour rewards to pollinating insects.

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Researchers found that populations of sexually deceptive orchids had higher "pollen transport efficiency" than the species with multiple pollinators. In other words, a higher percentage of the pollen that was taken from sexually deceptive orchids actually made it to another orchid of the same species.

So it appears that specializing with one pollinator -- and appealing to it with sex -- makes for a more direct line from one orchid flower to another, with less precious pollen lost in the transport process.

"These results could provide new insights in the understanding of evolutionary shifts between generalized to specialized pollination strategies in flowering plants," says Scopece, "and that sexy orchids do it better!"