“Peace, love, flower power, let’s all get along!”
Ohhhh hippies, love them or firehose them, there’s always a few hanging around ready to braid your hair and offer you a “complimentary hug”.
But flowers are not the innocent beauties people make them out to be. They deceive, they beguile and they manipulate. Nowhere is this more prevalent, than amon
gst the orchids, the largest family of flowering plants.
Any potential pollinator can fall prey to this duplicitousness. From the tachinid flies lured with a false promise of sex to the Telipogon peruvianus blooms (talk about blue bells!) to the more oft cited example of bumblebees attracted to Ophrys spp. orchid blooms, again with the pseudo-copulation. Hmmm…sounds like they’ve got a bit of a mother nature-complex, or is it Pollen-envy, I always get them mixed up…
Yes, I understand flowers are used in this context as a metaphor for something that I’m frankly too lazy to google right now. After all, I’m not a hippy who has never opened a science textbook, I’m a scientist who is too busy to open a book of literature, Yeesh!
I guess some of them are just pretty too…like this Erycina pusilla.
See more beguiling beauties in the #FlowersofSani on our social channels.
The #SaniProject2017 – An exploration into the beauty of boundless biodiversity.
