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Botany One
@botany.one

Corallorhiza striata, striped coralroot, is an orchid found in North America, and it hates paying for anything. A paper by Freudenstein and Barrett examines how it steals food from fungi and pollination from wasps. All orchids need a little help from fungi to begin with.

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Botany One
@botany.one

Orchid seeds are tiny, with no stored energy so they connect to the fungal network to start them off, until they photosynthesise their own food. Usually. Striped Coralroot never stops taking, even as an adult. It taps into Tomentella fungi. These fungi swap nutrients for sugars with trees.

Botany One
@botany.one

This orchid gets into the network and takes without giving anything back. It also needs pollinators. Male *Pimpla pedalis* wasps are looking for a female, or rather smelling for one. Striped Coralroot pumps out its own scent to get attention,

Botany One
@botany.one

so a male wasp looking for love finds an orchid and lands on it. While that’s happening the orchid slaps it with pollen. The male leaves disappointed and looks elsewhere for a female. It might find her, but the orchid is betting that it’ll find a few other orchids first,

Botany One
@botany.one

and deposit the pollen on another flower. Both these approaches rely on the partner not being able to resist the orchid. If they could, they would. That makes any exploitative strategy a bit of a risk. Also a biologist, Bidartondo writing back in 2005 said you shouldn’t expect a plant to be