Orchids that grow on trees in the forest canopy may access food by connecting to a network of fungal threads
comes from orchids that grow in soil in temperate environments, says Petrolli. But the majority of orchid species live in the tropics and are epiphytic plants, meaning that they live and grow on other, larger plants like trees.On the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, Petrolli and his colleagues sampled roots from 10 species of rainforest orchids growing on six individual trees, three each from two different tree species.
Petrolli says he is surprised at the consistency of the network patterns across different trees and several orchid species. “This phenomenon could be very frequent on trees in tropical forests,” he says. at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in the US, but adds that she isn’t necessarily convinced that orchids are facilitating the growth of others, and that the findings could actually show competition between orchids. “If you have only so much fungus available and that fungus can feed 10 orchids, well, it could be 10 of your offspring or it could feed a bunch of different species,” she says.
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