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There’s more news on the ram’s head ladyslipper orchid beat: Many of the rare little orchids in West Quebec are producing two flowers apiece, rather than the single flower seen everywhere else.
Mutants? Maybe.
Julia Charlebois, a biology student at the University of Ottawa, is studying 300 to 500 orchids near Gracefield and finding one plant after another with two heads. That’s highly unusual for this species.
She contacted the Citizen after reading Tuesday’s article on the discovery of a huge array of the little flowers west of Arnprior. The flower is globally rare, but for some reason this one site has 150,000 or more of the plants.
But the Arnprior orchids, like ram’s head ladyslippers elsewhere, have a single flower per plant (or no flower at all).
Now Charlebois is asking why her group is different from the rest, and is organizing a visit to the Arnprior site (off-limits to most people, as it is a working quarry) to compare.
She’s also curious about why many of the two-headed ram’s heads appear deformed.
She wrote to the Citizen: “I am guessing they’re mutated because the presentation of some of them is maladaptive (pushing the labellums together instead of orienting the flowers correctly), and then for the ones where the flowers are both oriented correctly there are some missing sepals (a leafy structure, outer ring of the flower).”
The labellum is the puffy “lip” at the bottom of these and other ladyslipper blooms.
“She might well be on to something,” said Dan Brunton, an ecologist who has studied the Arnprior orchids. He said the Gracefield flowers may be genetically different after being isolated for many generations, or there could be other factors such as stress or a virus.
In any case, he thinks it’s worth studying the little flowers which are so rare that many botanists never see them. “It might tell us something about how they tick.”
tspears@postmedia.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
Mutants? Maybe.
Julia Charlebois, a biology student at the University of Ottawa, is studying 300 to 500 orchids near Gracefield and finding one plant after another with two heads. That’s highly unusual for this species.
She contacted the Citizen after reading Tuesday’s article on the discovery of a huge array of the little flowers west of Arnprior. The flower is globally rare, but for some reason this one site has 150,000 or more of the plants.
But the Arnprior orchids, like ram’s head ladyslippers elsewhere, have a single flower per plant (or no flower at all).
Now Charlebois is asking why her group is different from the rest, and is organizing a visit to the Arnprior site (off-limits to most people, as it is a working quarry) to compare.
She’s also curious about why many of the two-headed ram’s heads appear deformed.
She wrote to the Citizen: “I am guessing they’re mutated because the presentation of some of them is maladaptive (pushing the labellums together instead of orienting the flowers correctly), and then for the ones where the flowers are both oriented correctly there are some missing sepals (a leafy structure, outer ring of the flower).”
The labellum is the puffy “lip” at the bottom of these and other ladyslipper blooms.
“She might well be on to something,” said Dan Brunton, an ecologist who has studied the Arnprior orchids. He said the Gracefield flowers may be genetically different after being isolated for many generations, or there could be other factors such as stress or a virus.
In any case, he thinks it’s worth studying the little flowers which are so rare that many botanists never see them. “It might tell us something about how they tick.”
tspears@postmedia.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
