"ghost orchids [Dendrophylax lindenii] have a habit of walking off in the bags and baskets of orchid enthusiasts. They can be sources of profit or private enjoyment. ... In the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, 20 miles outside of Naples... down a boardwalk that winds through sawgrass marsh and some of the state's last remaining old-growth cypress forest...
ghost orchids are virtually invisible except when they flower. They do this infrequently and irregularly. They are... difficult to cultivate, and occur naturally only in Southwest Florida and Cuba [and the Bahamas ?]... While researching The Orchid Thief, author Susan Orlean spent months tramping the backcountry and didn't see a single one. ... a spray of brilliant white on a bald cypress tree 150 feet distant, perhaps 60 feet high on the trunk. The spray turned out to be nine flowers, each as big as a child's palm, with narrow petals and a broad lip from which descended two long tapered tendrils... A series of frosts in the late 1980s and early 1990s killed many of the Corkscrew orchids. Some survivors were stolen by enthusiasts [poachers !]. ... Mike Owen, a botanist from the nearby Fakahatchee Strand... said he's never seen a ghost orchid taller than 23 feet tall, or with more than three flowers. ... the ghost orchid... can be pollinated only by a giant moth that flies only at night. ''The survival of the ghost orchid as a species is completely dependent, as far as we know, on one species of moth, the giant sphinx,'' Owen said. The giant sphinx moth feeds only on two kinds of flowers, moon flowers and ghost orchids, Owen said. 'It has a six-inch wingspan and a six-inch proboscis. It's sometimes dubbed `the flying tongue' . . . and it's flying around the swamp at night trying to detect these flowers.'' The flowers emit what Owen... dubbed an ''odoriferous chum slick,'' stronger at night, to attract the giant sphinx moth to their nectar. It sticks its tongue deep inside the flower to reach the nectar, picking up a packet of pollen in process, and then it ``sips up all that high energy sugar that fuels its flight to the next flower, like jet fuel.'' Owen has cataloged more than 300 ghost orchids at the Fakahatchee Strand; around 600 are in Big Cypress and about 60 are in the Panther Preserve. Nobody knows how many are growing in the smaller Corkscrew Swamp. ... everything had to go exactly according to plan to cause this particular ghost orchid to come into being 30 to 50 years ago (judging by the extensive root system); and at some more recent point a view-obstructing cypress branch had to fall... [Maryanne Biggar] stared at it for a while. Then -- scared of losing the flower for the forest -- ``I took my shoes off and pointed them in a line with where I was looking.'' ... Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary volunteers had trained a telescope on the flowers so that visitors could see them in perfect detail. The number of visitors -- which drops during the sweltering summer months -- has surged. ... More maddened enthusiasts are on the way, rumored to be flying in from all over. The flowers, up for now, will drop off over the next week." URL : http://www.miamiherald.com/460/story/173864.html ************** Regards, VB _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [email protected] http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
