0 a plant with beautifully coloured flowers that have an unusual shape
1 a plant with three-part flowers, or one of its flowers, which can be white or of several different colors
Here, we sampled all animals that were found on or between the stems and leaves of an orchid stand.
The orchid's fauna consisted almost entirely of web-building spiders, who can rely on self-made structures for a living, and ants, which were probably foraging workers.
The time from seed germination to the delivery of the surviving plants to the orchid galleries varied from 1 year to 18 months.
Thus, some proportion of a fruit fly population may not visit orchids if other plant species are available.
The orchids, attached to substrates, hang from the wires that support the palm-leaf roof.
The mortality rates of these nonsymbiotically propagated, epiphytic orchids during the acclimatization phase, prior to these experiments, were high, between 60 and 90%.
Unfortunately though, in the absence of specialist local knowledge, species-level identification of the orchid pollinaria is difficult.
Although only direct observation will provide a conclusive answer, we suspect that many more flies visit orchids than are subsequently caught bearing pollinaria.