KINGSLEY Dixon is lying prone on the ground, playing God. He’s in the act of procreating with all his clothes on, using a toothpick, a steady hand and a rare flying duck orchid.
The object of Dixon’s ardour is a tiny flower on a finger-high stalk, flecked green and yellow and oddly misshapen into a winged bird shape.
Every sighting of this orchid is a rare and exciting one; it’s an oddity: one of only four or five known species that can survive in the parched Australian arid zone, so unlike the lush tropics of most orchid habitats.
It also has bizarre sexual habits: a flower that lures male wasps by deliberately emitting the smell of female wasps. The flower’s shape and smell has a come-hither appeal to the wasp, which lands and tries to take off with the female wasp in its clutches. Instead, it is flung over and upside down by the flower’s hinged part, brushing pollen against itself and the flower stigma.
“Such perfect mechanical engineering,” mutters Dixon. “Not too much pressure, not too little.”
The rest of us wriggle beneath a woody pear tree on our stomachs, keeping one wary eye out for ground ticks and the other on Dixon’s toothpick as it performs its artificial sex act. He gives a gentle prod to a flower, releasing its yellow pollen sac and smearing it on the stigma of another orchid.
“All done,” he says triumphantly, untangling his tall lean frame from the leaf litter, standing and brushing himself down. “We’re about to bring this species in from the cold,” he announces, adjusting his rimless spectacles.
The director of plant sciences at Kings Park and Botanic Gardens, Dixon can’t leave it to the wasps to fertilise these orchids. “In a couple of weeks this orchid will develop pods with thousands of seeds inside. If we come back and collect them, we’ve saved this species from the threat of extinction.”
We’ve come to Eurardy Station, 575km due north of Perth, to find the little miracles growing in scrubby bush on ancient, windblown sand ridges. The clapped-out pastoral lease was bought by Bush Heritage Australia and not a moment too soon: goats have been cleared off, but a plague of rabbits regularly dines on dainty orchid stems.
Land clearing, fire, weeds, salinity — so many factors threaten orchid species that Kings Park, Perth’s botanical garden located on the city’s doorstep, has launched a rescue mission.
By midyear it will have completed the world’s largest single seed-banking program for orchids, with seed collected from all 400 known West Australian orchid species.
Every precious handful of seeds is split and deposited safely in two doomsday vaults, as Dixon calls them. Half are sent to Britain’s Millenium Seed Bank at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the world’s biggest seed repository, with seven million plant species. The rest are banked in Kings Park’s vaults.
And thus the search at Eurardy for more species, each one odder than the last. “Aha,” says Dixon, lurching suddenly toward the base of another nondescript bush. We’re all on our bellies once more.
“See that? This is a snail orchid. It’s sensitive to the touch and it springs a latch upwards to trap fungus gnats inside the flower. The insects blunder about until they escape by crawling upwards, along a corridor lined with one-way prongs — like a cattle race — and on the way out they deposit pollen on the stigma and pick up a new pollen load.”
It all sounds so improbable that Dixon could be pulling our legs. He’s already told us the flying duck orchid wasp probably lives its whole life within a 50m radius of the plant. That his flightless female partner, who spends almost her entire life underground, must drag herself up a blade of grass to a precise height and wait for an orgasmic male wasp to fly by and mate. And that the cunning orchid has learned to grow to exactly the same height.
Nature seems so perilously balanced. What if the native wasp dies out? Or climate change heats up the sandplain? What fate then for the flying duck orchid?
ORCHID sex has titillated the greatest scientific minds, including the father of evolution, Charles Darwin.
Darwin became so intrigued by orchids that after one holiday spent crouched in a Devon meadow watching insects pollinate wild British species, he came home vowing to swap his hobby of breeding pigeons for raising orchids. He marvelled at the “beautiful contrivances” used by orchid flowers to lure bees and moths, in order to propagate their own species. In one orchid that lured in pollinators at all hours, he noted the “bright purple tint that attracts the day-fliers and the strong foxy odour the night-fliers”.
He even published a thick volume in 1862 entitled The Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, laying out their steamy secrets in page after page of diagrams and careful experiments.
Darwin was grateful that orchids afforded him the chance to show his phenomenal powers of observation. Three years earlier, on publication of his seminal work, On the Origin of Species, he had been ridiculed in some quarters for giving too general reasons for his doctrine of natural selection.
“I think this little volume will do good to the Origin as it will show that I have worked hard at details,” he wrote touchingly to afriend.
Nearly 150 years later, Dixon is enthusing over a newly discovered orchid that Darwin might have marvelled at. Orchid experts across the globe are swapping excited emails about its significance, Dixon says, but at this stage they disagree.
We’ve met this time in his modern, light-filled laboratory cum office in the Biodiversity Conservation Centre at Kings Park. Beyond the pots of wild orchids sitting on the windowsill are glimpses of the 400ha botanical wilderness that Perth’s city fathers left undisturbed for posterity.
Dixon places the controversial new orchid on a table before me, a delicate white spider orchid with purple eyelashes along its sides. “We think this little fellow is the newest orchid for Australia. It doesn’t even have a name,” he tells me.
“Until last week, we had one poor specimen. Then a team went down south and I got a phone call. The researcher said, ‘We’ve found a patch of 100 plants!’
I thought, that’s great, but I could tell there was something else.
“He said, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but I’ve caught two wasps working the flower.’ I said, ‘You’re joking.”‘
Dixon can see I’m looking blank. “It’s Darwinian evolution in the making, so it’s a really exciting scientific find.”
Orchids are teasers and fakers, he explains; some trick insects with spectacular colour and patterns that suggest they’ll get a food reward; others are sexual teasers, with large lip petals resembling a female insect and longer, exaggerated petals tipped with swollen glands that emit a sexy odour only male wasps cansmell. “This orchid is a food deceptor,” Dixon explains. Just like the big, in-your-face hothouse orchids, it offers insects the promise of food with a colourful display. But we think it’s in the process of turning into a sexual deceptor, because last week two wasps were spotted hanging on these long petal tips.
“The wasps can smell the female, but they can’t see it because this orchid hasn’t developed the large lip petal yet.” So the orchid is in the process of an evolutionary switch from one form of mimicry to another? “Exactly. It’s like a transvestite locked in a sexual halfway house. It hasn’t had its nip and tuck yet,” Dixon says.
“When I saw this, I got straight on to the internet and told colleagues at the Missouri Botanic Gardens that we had a white spider orchid that was dragging in wasps.
“They said, ‘Oh my God, you’ve found the missing link. Everyone’s been trying to find evolution in action.”‘
“What’s going on?” writes Peter Bernhardt, professor of botany at Saint Louis University in Missouri and research associate of Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens, in an email to Dixon. “This new orchid species is novel and perplexing because the flower can’t seem to make up its mind. Is this new species a food mimic evolving towards sex mimicry or is it a sex mimic evolving towards food mimicry? Better yet, are we looking at a modern-day descendant of the floral version of the missing link?”
Bernhardt hopes so, but wonders if “this could be, oh dear … a false lead”. Could the orchids simply be ‘bastard offspring’ from two species, or hybrids thrown up by the stress of six years of drought in southwest WA, where they were found?
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“Everyone is trying to find evolution in action and we human beings think that because we’ve arrived, it’s all over,” he says, returning the precious orchid back to its spot on the windowsill.
“But it hasn’t. That’s why protecting these landscapes is so important. We need to protect the evolutionary processes that were in full swing when we arrived here.”A FEW days earlier, as we headed in a four-wheel-drive north out of Geraldton towards Eurardy Station, Dixon had explained why this ancient part of the continent is so rich in species.
“We’ve realised that any little prominence or pimple on a flat landscape like this is actually like a miniature Galapagos where unique species have evolved.”
Dixon lifts one hand from the steering wheel and points towards a prominent rise. “That’s White Peak, it’s a unique hill that has a particular acacia species growing on it and nowhere else. So everywhere we pick up clusters of signature species.”
“On this continent we didn’t have glaciers turning everything into a great big iceblock where nothing survives,” he explains. “So the dunes at Eurardy, which were created in the last ice age 18,000 years ago, have had the opportunity to steadily develop their own micro-habitats.”
Nature went mad: plants across WA evolved into more than 12,000 different species, 80 per cent of which are found nowhere else on the planet. (The entire British Isles has only 1200 species of plants, many of which are also found across Europe.) Eighty new orchids alone have been identified in the past 10 years across the state.
But 36 orchids are already on the threatened species list.
In 2000, international scientists in the journal Nature listed WA’s southwest corner — including Eurardy and its orchid habitat — as one of the world’s 25 hot spots where rich biodiversity is under severe threat.
At the time, Dixon, his botanist colleagues Andrew Brown and Steve Hopper, and plant illustrator Pat Dundas were halfway through a 16-year labour of love to document all the state’s orchids. Their beautiful, hefty tome Orchids of Western Australia was published last September.
The book features the world’s bluest orchid, the most rainbow-hued one, and the most elusive species: WA’s underground orchid, which flowers beneath the earth and cracks the surface soil to allow insects to pollinate it.
So rare and inaccessible was one Kimberley orchid that it had not been seen flowering for years. When a single flower was spotted, a pastoralist carefully wrapped it up and put it on a mail plane so that artist Dundas could paint it in her Perth studio that night.
As we stride back to the vehicle through scrubby belts of mallee and wattle thickets at Eurardy Station, Dixon stops to point out the struggle for survival: plants that are straggly and half-dead because rainfall has halved in recent years.
Climate change has been around for millions of years and Australian flora has adapted endlessly to that change, he says.
“But now it’s happening too fast, and what we’ve also done is lopped off all the escape hatches, ways that a single seed might once have moved across the landscape. They’ve all gone: we’ve got farmlands, highways, towns, all the rest of it. So we really can’t leave it to nature now.”
BACK in the plant laboratory, I ask Dixon why he’s such an irrepressible optimist. The suburban Perth bushland he grew up in has long since disappeared, like the native plant nursery run by his two adoptive aunts who nurtured his botanical interest as a child. And haven’t more plant species already become extinct in Australia’s western third than in all of America?
By way of an answer, Dixon takes me down a corridor where we look through a glass window into a nursery. The plant babies inside are as precious as any couple’s newborn child and Dixon — who has no children — looks like a proud father.
“That is a rare donkey orchid growing in tissue culture; see the flower spike growing inside the glass flask? We have a group of orchid carers, volunteers who help us grow all our critically endangered orchids. We seed-orchard them and eventually, if necessary, they can be put back in the wild.”
But there was one more secret that orchids had to yield up before such regeneration became possible, a secret that even Darwin didn’t know. Every orchid needs fungus to germinate and, trickily, every species relies on a different type of fungus.
Kings Park scientists have cracked the code; they can pair fungus with orchid and grow both. “See those pinkish blooms, like lipstick?” Dixon says, pointing to another rack of test tubes. “They are flying duck orchid fungus.”
At his desk, he completes the final step in the flying duck orchid rescue mission, tapping a bulging seed pod over the mouth of an envelope. “See those little fly specks coming out? They are money in the biological bank, the first seeds for the whole species we will ever have collected,” he says.
“Each black dot is a viable seed, and there are probably five or six thousand of them here. We’ll put some in a vial in our liquid nitrogen container and a small sample will be going over to the Kew gardens.”
A teaspoon of orchid seed is effectively a species preserved in perpetuity, he continues, folding the top of the envelope. “We can then sit back and know we’ve bought time to rescue the species.
“That’s the reality of conservation on this continent: things are hanging by a thread,” says Dixon, looking momentarily grim.
“We need global partnerships with Kew to risk-manage collections, to share knowledge about how to store seed and how to grow plants so that we can build the population.
“But climate change is making it all the more urgent.”
The transvestite spider orchid may not live in the wild long enough to complete its Darwinian transformation. But at least Kings Park’s orchid rescue efforts are likely to be used as a template by the Millennium Seed Bank for other regions across the world.
A flurry of international emails about the orchid oddity has ended in a message from the world’s greatest authority on WA orchids, Steve Hopper, who is Dixon’s co-author, a former director of Kings Park and present head of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.
“The continuing discovery of new and highly localised species of orchid in south WA reinforces the global importance of the region,” writes Hopper.
But the mysterious spider orchid seems to resemble a rare specimen he and a colleague found and described back in 2001, growing in a spot 100km further south.
Dixon is in two minds. “I still think the newness factor is there: never before has a plant in my room been known to lure wasps like that,” he says.
“We are now working on a detailed molecular analysis to try and unravel if this is the same rare species or a brand new one.”
Even if the little transvestite orchid turns out not to be a new species, Dixon’s colleagues now know that another 100 or so plants are thriving in the wild.
“This is what makes Australia’s biodiversity research so exciting,” says the beaming botanist. “The unexpected crops up and confounds the best minds.”