Rare Orchid Found
The Daintree Rainforest contains a treasure-trove of biodiversity, rare and endemic species. It represents a continuous living history depicting the evolution of plant and animal species over a greater period than any other natural terrestrial landscape on earth.
Cooper Creek Wilderness occupies a strategically significant portion within the middle reach of the celebrated Cooper Creek catchment. This area encapsulates the majority of attributes of the greater Daintree including flora relicts, primitive animals, examples of on-going evolution and speciation, rare and endemic flora and fauna and living links with recent past incursions of flora and fauna from south-east Asia.
Knowing the rainforests of the Daintree in all their moods and seasons and the intricacies, complexities and interrelationships of their inhabitants is the major undertaking of Cooper Creek Wilderness. It is a task that far exceeds the capabilities of one generation, consequently the accumulation of materials and resources from a wide range of sources are balanced against the direct experiences and observations of inhabitants living within the very heart of this inspirational ecosystem.
Our interpretation on guided rainforest tours flows from this accumulation of knowledge and experiences. This is the intellectual property that Cooper Creek Wilderness shares with visitors to the Daintree rainforest. It is unique and dynamic.
The discovery of even one previously unknown species becomes a cause for celebration, an event that enriches our store of information and expands our understandings of the amazing Daintree rainforest.
About 7 years ago, Paul O’Dowd a talented local nature enthusiast and tour guide found a very strange plant in Cooper Creek Wilderness.
Paul’s Story
The beauty of having a rainforest as your office is that you constantly encounter things that you have never seen before. I have seen cassowaries courting, if you could call it that. I’ve seen fields of luminous fungi and despite what the books might say I’ve even seen luminous fungi spores! I regularly find things that require a bit of head scratching to identify; less obvious things; slimy things usually; leaf litter critters. That’s where the real action is, in the leaf litter. A casual stroll in this forest with an eye on the undergrowth will reveal an absolute circus of activity and the performers are well and truly the strangest in the forest.
Luckily, science has developed a system of steps you can think through that can quickly deliver you to a pretty good idea of what on Earth the thing you are looking at is. Even though you might not have seen anything quite like it before. Sometimes though, you stumble upon something that you just can’t figure out. That is exactly what happened one morning as I led a walk through the rainforest at Cooper Creek Wilderness.
We were in the stunning Fan Palm Gallery area of the forest when I noticed at the base of a giant Penda tree, a tiny grey stalk with a perfect little Chinese lantern shaped cage at its tip.
The cage contained a mass of dust-sized, golden, thread-like particles that wafted away with the slightest disturbance. My eyes agog, I quickly photographed the little object and dusted a few of the threads into a film canister.As to what to tell the people on the walk with me… I told them I had no idea and that I’d never seen anything like it before. We tossed a few ideas around. I wondered about the possibility of it being a weird fungus on account of its complete lack of chlorophyll, the definitive plant chemical. The green stuff. Plus, it popped up virtually overnight. But the little threads weren’t right for any fungus I knew. Maybe it was a parasitic plant of some kind? There are some plants that attach to the roots of other plants and freeload on the efforts of the host. Some parasites have parts above the ground like the native cherry which, unless you knew the cherries’ sinister secret, you might never twig to the fact that you haven’t seen one growing on its own. Others, like the Balenophora, only poke their bits out of the leaf litter for the predictable reasons. They have no need for chlorophyll because they get everything they need from the host. They graft themselves onto the roots and just grow there. When it’s time to do something about the next generation, the forest floor erupts in a million large lumpy yellow nuggets. These grow velvety egg-like flower clusters with an incredible story of their own, and when all is done, after a few months, they turn black and messy and break down to nothing on the forest floor over a few weeks. This was no Balenophora though. It could have been its antimatter opposite. This little thing was so delicate that light shone through the stem where it hit it. The best description of it is ‘gracile’. The Balenophora are like lumpy rough skinned potatoes which a duck has mistaken for a nest. None of the information I could trawl up in my library or on the net yielded anything like it. I started to think it might be something new. The next step in the inquiry is ‘the expert’. I sent the photographs and some electron micrographs of the threads to a pair of scientists working for the CSIRO, our federal research organization. It sparked quite some interest and discussion but eventually it seems that the thing was most likely to be an orchid. Gastrodia queenslandicus, a parasite which spent most of its time just under the leaf litter as a tiny, yam-shaped tuber or string of tubers.
Most plants support an important fungus in their roots which accounts for a large part of their feeding abilities. Some parasites, Balenophoranot included, use that fungal network to hitch into the system. This orchid appears to do this. Also unlike Balenophora, it waits many years before flowering, which it does en mass and only for a few weeks before vanishing underground again. For this reason it has proven very elusive to a small number of botanists who have been keeping an eye out for it for years.
Apparently it was collected many years ago but the collection site was lost. A couple of other populations had been found elsewhere in the region but the location of the original patch was a mystery.There was some professional interest in finding the site which the type specimen had been collected from. All the scientists knew was that it was collected from somewhere around Cooper Creek, in the general area of the ones I had found, so apparently we had located the sought after patch, apparently generating quite some excitement amongst these botanists in the process.
I love my office.
Paul o’Dowd.
Four years after Paul’s discovery we were able to take a representative of CSIRO straight to the place where Paul had found the seed box of a minute orchid, Gastrodia queenslandica. Bruce Grey is a renowned botanist who wanted to photograph and catalogue the discovery for Australia’s herbarium records.
He observed that the plant was generally found among the roots of the yellow penda Ristantia pachysperma and conjectured that there is a relationship between the two plants.
Comparing it with the size of the green tree ant, you will appreciate how small this little brown orchid is, and how difficult it is to find among the leaf litter.
If you want to see this orchid, then you will need to visit the Cooper Creek Wilderness in February.