How to be an insect: the unsung human pollinators of Saving our Species

Source: australianpollinatorweek.org.au/

Not many people can say they’ve spent a day doing an insect’s work, but that’s exactly what Threatened Species Officers from the Saving our Species (SoS) program do by hand-pollinating threatened native orchids to help ensure their survival in the wild.

One of the main reasons they use hand pollination is because many orchids depend on a specific pollinator species, such as a flies or gnats for their pollination. If the specific insect pollinator isn’t present or active at the time of flowering, the plant is unlikely to develop seed and cannot reproduce.

Some of our threatened orchid species have very low pollination rates, and at this stage we can’t be sure if this is due to their pollinators being naturally low in numbers, whether pollinator numbers are declining, or whether the environmental conditions for the pollinators are not aligning with the time the orchids are flowering, or a combo of all three. We do know a low pollination rate results in low levels of natural seed set, which is a cause for concern.

That’s where our human pollinators come in!

In most cases, hand pollination is done to increase low levels of natural seed set, however, it may also help improve the quality of seed or minimise hybridisation between species.

CLICK HERE to keep reading about hand pollination for the Save Our Species Program

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