Читать книгу Extreme Nature - Mark Carwardine - Страница 7

NAME	ghost orchid Epipogium aphyllum
LOCATION	North and Central Europe east to Japan
ABILITY	cheating a fungus

© Jeffrey Wood/Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

The natural world as we know it is built on partnerships. But in all societies there are cheats, and plants are no exception. Most green plants would be unable to exist without the help of fungi, which provide them with food-exchange partnerships. In fact, the invasion of the land by plants – algae – was probably only made possible by such partnerships. It has even been suggested that early land plants developed roots just so they could join forces with the fungal roots, or hyphae.

Most plants are proper partners, giving the carbohydrates they manufacture with their chlorophyll. Some, notably orchids, have such a close partnership that they don’t even bother to produce proper food packages to accompany their embryos into the world, instead relying on fungi in the soil to provide the food needed for germination and early growth. This allows an orchid to produce lightweight, microscopic seeds – millions of them.

Some orchids, however, have become cheats: they use fungi that have partnerships with trees, and they never give anything in exchange. Via fungal hyphae, these orchid vampires tap into the trees, siphoning off nutrients. The give-away is often the fact that they have stopped producing chlorophyll and so aren’t green but a rather sickly pinkish cream, like the ghost orchid, or brown, like the bird’s-nest orchid. Some, such as western coralroot, are blood red or even purple. The drawback is that, without the fungus, the orchid will die. And one day a fungus might just evolve a way to get its own back.