News Replacing Florida's Lost Orchids Flowers

Plants

Seeds

March 26, 2014 ---Wild orchids in South Florida were all but eliminated by humans turning them into disposable potted plants, beginning in the 1800s. A comeback is difficult because orchid seeds have only about a one-in-a-million chance of creating a new plant. But there's an effort to bring the wild orchid population back to its former glory.



Maria Agudelo, Agriscience student - Terra Environmental Research Institute

It is really exciting to actually have been able to take them out of the bottles because we were very careful, like you can't touch them, they might fall, they might break. So the fact that we were able to open them and take the things out and go through the leaves, it was a fun experiment.



Surey Rios, Agriscience Instructor - Terra Environmental Research Institute

Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden is trying to grow a million orchids. To do that they have to grow a lot more than that because of the survivability of these orchids is not that high. In order for us to grow a million, the students have to do a hundred of the set ups, and it's very difficult for one place to do that on their own, so trying to get all the schools out there to participate and to have their own set up.



Carl Lewis, Director - Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden

Late 1800s, early 1900s there were thousands of orchids on a daily basis being pulled out of the forests here in south Florida all the way to the everglades. Those orchids were loaded by the thousands on box cars, sent up to northern cities here in the united states as disposable house plants.



They seemed like an unlimited resource. There were so many orchids here in south Florida. But you do that enough times, year after year and eventually the populations are depleted.



There's really no hope that they'll come back in large numbers unless they have some help. So with the Million Orchid Project we want to just do that sudden large boost of the orchid population. We want to get so many of them out there that they'll stand a chance



Each orchid fruit or seed pod has about 2 or 3 million individual seeds. Those seeds are like dust, they can blow thousands of miles in the wind. But they have to land in just the right spot, just the right level of light, just the right level of moisture. In a seed pod of 2 or 3 million seeds, probably five or 10 of them will actually land where they need to be to grow.



The great thing about a micropropagation lab like this, is we can use artificial conditions to make all of those seeds grow. So we can take all of those individual seeds and put them into bottles with growth medium that gives them just the right mixture of chemicals, just the right level of moisture that they would find in the bark of a tree. And we can give them just the right level of light. From one seed pod we can produce thousands and thousands of individual orchid plants. So having a lab like this allows us to tip the odds way in our favor of producing enough orchids to repopulate the community.



It's great to involve students because we think this project is really where conservation is going in the future. That this is conservation in places where people live, where people work, where people study.



Jabari McNichols, Agriscience student - Terra Environmental Research Institute

We really have been told by the past generation that we are the inheritors and ambassadors of the world, so I really do think that it's a lot of our responsibility to correct the mistakes that were done in the past. Maybe if there's just enough of us passing along the message and doing the right thing, then maybe we can make a difference.



Carl Lewis, Director - Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden

These are the orchids that we would have seen if we were here a hundred fifty years ago. On all of the oak trees, all the mahogany trees. So the idea is to get them back to that critical mass where you'll see them everywhere and there'll be enough that they'll seed themselves.



