Rare Ghost Orchid Has Multiple Pollinators | Short Film Showcase

The swamp itself is steeped in mystery, holding a wildness that is so increasingly rare in modern life. There's this very like ghost-like thing dancing off the edge of a tree; it just deepens the mystery. It deepens the power of those places. There's just nothing like it. The way it has these curling tendrils and that long nectar stem, the artistry is in the form itself.

There are so few of them. They are so endangered and so elusive. We hardly know anything about them. We all have this inherent desire to know the answers. This is something that is in our backyard that science doesn't know yet: what pollinates the ghost orchid? You know, this is the burning question that has outlasted generations of scientists. This summer we’re like, you know what, if we're gonna do this, we got to go.

Always this team is going about it in different ways. We are about 50 feet in a cypress tree. Carlton is having to wade through waist-deep water and then paddle board miles. The chase of this photo is definitely pushing all of us; it's like near breaking point. I don't actually know the ingredients of obsession; maybe it's the chance of trying something that seems impossible.

Orchids are the most diverse group of flowering plants in the world; there are about 25-30 thousand species. The most iconic orchid pollination story is one that Darwin was interested in 150 years ago, and it involves an orchid in Madagascar that has a nectar tube that's over a foot long. Darwin had predicted that a moth must have a tongue that matches the length of the nectar tube. This thing was so extreme that his expression was "Good heavens, what insect is sucking here?"

In South Florida, it's the most diverse place for orchids in the United States, and so I was really drawn to the ghost orchid because how little was known about it. It's all about this game, that enchantment, you know? It's this nondescript twig-like leafless plant growing on the side of a cypress tree until it pushes this ephemeral, ghost-like flower for the sole purpose of attracting a pollinator.

A super specific flower adapted and co-evolved to a super specific pollinator. It's always been suspected that the giant sphinx moth pollinates the ghost orchid based on the size of the moth and the length of the tongue. In a scientific sense, we need to prove that. This is the perfect embodiment of the scientific process: here's a theory, let's put it to the test.

Mack and I had been talking about trying to photograph ghosts or kids being pollinated, going back to 2014. Here’s how I’m gonna try to do it. The idea is actually to use camera traps and sleep out in a swamp for however long it takes. The hard part, though, is that the ghost, like the way those roots are, and how old it is, is all over that. That's got to be a 50-year-old orchid by the size of those roots.

The ghost orchid here in Corkscrew Swamp, they've called the super ghost, and that is because it produces so many flowers every single year. It is a mass of roots that just spider out in all directions. It's not just one bloom, it's not two blooms; it can get up to sixteen blooms at a time, which is insane. I got Indi; it's a non-stop moth party, or I hope it is.

Into this swamp, you got everything? Yeah, ready! We were started undertaking this project that called Peter, who is an expert in orchids, who worked for years on pollination attempts. Peter's an animal; he actually went out in the swamp for weeks at a time and stood on a ladder aiming an infrared video camera at a ghost orchid, patrolling different flowers, hoping something would come.

It was so frustrating for so long that I was almost just ready to walk away from the whole thing. And then Mack and Carlton were kind of like, you know, yeah, we were meant to do this; we've got to do this. All right, let’s do it! I was ascending and Mack was coming up as well, and he looked up the trunk and just saw a giant sphinx moth. They're so camouflaged; I don't, I have no idea how Mack even spotted it.

The moth's sitting right there, and we're kind of wondering, you know, is the sun gonna set? Is this thing gonna take off and fly right to the orchid and pollinate it? Tonight might be the night.

These ancient canopies that used to extend all over the southeast hold an entire ecosystem. This ghost orchid is a relic of that ecosystem, of how it used to be. I think for Mack, the chance to come here to Corkscrew, to go to this amazing ghost orchid, and try to put a camera trap there is something no one even thought of doing.

So, while I'm having to climb up 50 feet to see and photograph mine, Carlton is by water trying to make this image happen. We're kind of on parallel pursuits to try to answer this question. Part of the obsession for me, the biggest part of the intrigue, is where this orchid lives because these are the wildest, most inaccessible places we have left in the state of Florida. Arguably in the East, there are these deep flooded remote swamps, twisted and gnarled trunks forming these cathedrals.

It's dark, it's green; it feels like you're in the Amazon or in some other world, wading waist-deep amongst alligators, panthers, bears. It's really easy to get really wild, really remote, really quick. We are getting a monsoon downpour here; I actually love it. And they rage like this; it feels like the cloth come to life. I kind of do too. I wouldn't be surprised if we get an inch of rain and we can actually see this swamp ride.

There's a really strange fervor about these orchids. I didn't understand it at first, but I used to say those people that are crazy about this effort—I’m not to say we, because I'm doing things that I would never do. I stay up at night; I cannot sleep. The ghost orchid frenzy is a real one.

The intent of these ghost orchids is actually to produce a flower each year, and of those, one in ten actually get pollinated. So, if you stack up the odds, you need to have to put out ten cameras on ten different blooms to have a probability of one moth coming. The moths are so rare—is there even a moth in the vicinity that could pollinate this? There's a reason why it hasn't been documented before; that's because it's really, really difficult.

The craziest thing just happened! I was looking down, changing out my battery, and then pop! The camera went off ten times. I thought it was a false trigger, and I looked up. In like 12 inches from my face, there is a moth sitting on the orchid flower.

Scrolling through literally thousands of photographs, you had itty-bitty moths that were just kind of hovering in space, medium-sized moths landing on the flower but no capability to get any nectar as a reward. There's one photo where the orchid just bounces out of the frame, down and out of the frame. I'm like, what in the world is going on? There's a little frog that was hanging off of it.

So you're getting like this window into this microcosm that happens around this bloom. So let's keep these cameras going. Let's see what we have after the end of a couple of months. Just the ones that are about to open: one, two, three, four. But then I count eight more after these four.

See what this baby's gonna go up! I get to the camera, I hit play, and I start scrolling through images. I remember my heart jumping. "Yeah, what?! He's right across from me!" And I said, "Peter, I've got one! Orange on the flanges!" He's like, "What?" I was like, "Orange on the wings!" He looks at this, and he goes, "Dude, you have the first ever photo of a giant sphinx moth at a ghost orchid!"

So you have this elongated body of the giant sphinx kind of arcing back, and then its wings are spread and hovering, and its proboscis is out right in front of the orchids, and it's just sitting there. It's like it was just placed there. There are multiple frames of this giant sphinx, and I started looking at them closely, zoomed in, and looked at the face of this moth, and it is covered—just covered—with a different kind of pollen, plenty of it most likely from a moon vine.

I'm looking at it even closer, and I'm thinking, wow, you know, it's got its proboscis all the way into this flower, and yet its face is still an inch or two inches out of the flower. Could it be that the giant sphinx actually has a proboscis that is almost too long to get its face into the orchid? Could it be that the giant sphinx is actually robbing nectar from this flower?

Peter and I were both like, you know, this kind of turns the whole theory on its head. This existing idea that this was the only pollinator, it's perhaps not actually providing any benefit at all to the flower. And that was a wild moment! The discovery opens up this whole new kind of Pandora's box. There are all these other things that add more questions. We, as humans, like a simple story, but it seems that at least in this case, reality is a little more complex.

In our 5 in the morning, 1:00 in the morning, 10:00 p.m., I cycle through a couple more nights, and all of a sudden BAM! There is a huge moth right on the lip of this ghost dodging. He's huge! There's a moth that was bigger than anything I expected to see. It has so much weight when it lands; it like brings the orchid down out of frame and then back.

A moth of that species visited this orchid three times. So, I shared these with Peter and colleagues, and that's when everyone started to get really excited. He's like, so this is a giant sphinx! And I was like, no! And he was just like, damn! And I was like, dude, that's way more into it! This was never even suspected before; you know, like I'd never even thought of that sphinx being a pollinator.

There's pollen on the face. That's like, that's the money shot! These discoveries basically are unprecedented. Each photo that Mack and Carlton get lends a new perspective into the behavior, and it's not just about ghosts now. Pollination is critical to our livelihoods. Good old Chuck Darwin would be proud of us! Yes, there is a physical image at the end of the day, but it is the journey of getting to that that is what's so rewarding, especially in a place that we care so much about.

Over the past three years, dozens of trips, hundreds of hours, I've fallen in love with these very specific corners of these remote swamps. We still have these truly wild stories that the rest of the world doesn't know about.