The Cooper’s black orchid is a delicate flower that lacks lush green leaves and flashy petals. Instead, it has a stem that lies on the floor of New Zealand’s broadleaf forests for most of the year, only popping up during the summer months to blossom with pendulous brown and white blooms. The orchid sprouts a pale brown tuber instead of growing a tangle of roots. At the Lions Ōtari Plant Conservation Laboratory in Wellington, conservationists are working to bring the Cooper’s black orchid back from the brink. They dissect the roots under a microscope to look for fungi that could help the seeds germinate. DNA testing helps the team rule out known orchid pathogens. Potential candidates are then extracted from roots and grown on petri dishes. Once they’re mature enough, fungi get paired up with seeds on another dish.
From one of the lab’s three fridge-sized incubators, conservationist Jennifer Alderton-Moss pulls out dozens of petri dishes containing the orchids’ speck-sized seeds and root-emanating tubers.
2023-05-29 06:00:00
Article from www.sciencenews.org