As an appropriate start, I’m pretty excited that the earliest orchid ever discovered so far comes from the West Indies. It’s called Meliorchis caribea, which is a pretty name, and effectively means Caribbean Stingless Bee Orchid. Actually, only the pollen of the orchid was discovered, on a bee which got trapped in amber some 15 to 20 million years ago, in what is now the Dominican Republic.
So what does it look like? Well, judging from its photo, it looks like a scattering of tiny dried dog food pellets across the back of a bee that might have died yesterday. I personally find this very moving, but I didn’t want to bring it here for copyright reasons. Anyone can see it, in the downloadable paper, along with a (slightly edited) description of an altogether different flavour:
“The tapering pollinia consist of more than 100 loosely packed angular massulae of approximately 200 x 100 micrometres in size, each of which encapsulates several tetrads; obovoid pollen units are tightly packed.”
Ramírez, Santiago & Gravendeel, Barbara & Singer, Rodrigo & Marshall, Charles & Pierce, Naomi. (2007). Dating the origin of the Orchidaceae from a fossil orchid with its pollinator. Nature. 448. 1042-5. 10.1038/nature06039.
I’m quite taken with this because the intersection between vocabulary and knowledge is an area of major interest in my project. At the moment, I’m happy that I’m scientifically literate enough not to be freaked out by the above, yet still distant enough from it that I can be struck by the novelty of it all and wonder…
As for the flower itself? Here we are up against the boundaries of knowledge. The paper has some interesting comments on the flower’s closest living relatives, on the position of the pollen on the bee and what that means about its shape, but who would dare put together an imaginative reconstruction from this? These scientists didn’t, but they do think they can apply this pollen to the task of finding out when orchids first appeared (the late cretaceous, when dinosaurs roamed the earth).
And then, the other thing I’m interested in is who makes knowledge of West Indian plants. In this case, the authors of the paper are an extremely international team of specialists, working in mainland USA, the Netherlands and Brazil. I suspect that in many cases their contributions were based on an ability to compare across vast spatial and chronological ranges of species of flowers and bees.