Orchids and Ants - It's the time of the season to feel the love

It's that time again - the end of the dry season that has so many plants and birds around here focusing on procreation.  Is this the season the Zombies had in mind when they recorded "The Time Of The Season"?  Click here to listen while you read about these ant-loving Cow Horn Orchids.

(A little aside - our friend and former neighbor at SteppingStones, Chris Harris, went to school at St. Albans with members of the Zombies.  He knew Zombies before they were cool!)

For weeks I have been watching as the slender green inflorescent spikes on the orchids get longer and longer, almost like watching asparagus grow.  Nothing happens for ages and then suddenly, boom like that, there they are.

Impressive, no?  You might even say hard to miss.  But you would be surprised.

Most of these orchids, which are epiphytes, are way up high in the tree canopy and the clusters of blossoms can get lost in sheer mass of vegetation.

High overhead, the flowers are easy to pass under without noticing.  The flowers on the right are on a long stalk coming out of the dense green plant on the left.

You have to actually look for them at the right time of the season, then you wonder how you could have possibly overlooked them before.

I was using my zoom lens and also cropped the photo to get this image of the flower that was way over my head.  Look at the curlicue petals.  According to various references I consulted, the curly petals are what gives it the common name of cow horn. No, I don't see it either.  

I know of some plants that are closer to the ground and are amenable to ladder-less photography.  The flower stalks are overrun with ants!

Ants are on all the flowers; the dried ones, the fresh ones, the buds.  They get nectar from the green patches on the flowers.  

Myrmecophila, the genus of the orchid, means "ant lover" (myrmex is Greek for ant and phila is Greek for love).  Easy to see that the ants might love the orchid, after all they get sweet nectar from it.  But what do the orchids love about the ants?

The big(ger) picture - This is a small portion of a huge mass of orchids behind our generator shed.  The flower stalks are so long that they are out of the frame.  What I want you to see are the cylindrical pseudobulbs from which the leaves emerge.  They are the key to the ant/orchid relationship.

The ants live in the hollow pseudobulbs.  They pack the pseudobulbs with all kinds of stuff - dead ants and other insects, dirt and sand, plant debris and seeds.  I bet there is ant poo in there, too.  In other words, they provide and deliver a sort of soil to the orchids up high in the tree branches.  They deserve their love.

Whose your daddy?

You can read more about Cow Horn Orchids and see a few photos of other orchids here and here.