Orchids: The Masters Of Lying, Cheating & Stealing

To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords: Mycelium Mycorrizhae: a fungus that grows in association with the roots of a plant in a symbiotic or mildly pathogenic relationship. Mycoheterotroph: A plant that is completely reliant on fungus for all of its nutrition. Sexual deception: A trick used by numerous orchid species of looking and/or smelling like female insects in order to draw male insects to their flowers (for pollination) Food deception: Rather than offering pollinators real food rewards (such as nectar or pollen), some orchids merely mimic the looks and smells of other, nearby flowers that offer such rewards. Pollinia: In most flowering plants, pollen is a powdery substance made up of tons of individual pollen grains. But orchids pack their grains into a couple of sticky sacks (pollinia) instead. Epiphyte: A plant that grows harmlessly upon another plant. Lots of tropical orchids are epiphytes Lithophyte: A plant that grows on rocks MinuteEarth is produced by Neptune Studios LLC https://neptunestudios.info If you like what we do, you can help us! - Become our patron: https://patreon.com/MinuteEarth - Buy our merch: http://dftba.com/minuteearth - Buy our book: https://minuteearth.com/books - Sign up to our newsletter: http://news.minuteearth.com - Share with your friends and family - Leave us a comment (we read them!) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices