News and Stories

Happy National Orchid Day! Did you know that the Zoo’s Center for Conservation and Research of Endangered Wildlife (CREW) and the Zoo’s offsite property at Bowyer Farm both work with orchids? Several species of orchids have been initiated by Dani Parisi, a horticulturalist at Bowyer Farm, and are currently being kept in the Plant Conservation Division’s Tissue Culture Collection at CREW. Unlike other species in the tissue collection that are initiated using a process called micropropagation, which involves propagating clonal plants from plant tissue, these orchids have been grown from seed!

Orchid pods of varying ripeness were carefully harvested to collect the seeds used in this project. Orchid seeds are so small that they look like dust! To sterilize the surface of the seeds, the orchid seeds were put in a microcentrifuge tube filled with a bleach solution and the tube was shaken by hand. After sterilization, the seeds were placed in test tubes and observed over time for signs of germination and growth. This process was completed for several different orchid species, such as Platanthera lacera (Ragged Fringed Orchid), Spiranthes cernua (Nodding Ladies’ Tresses), Aplectrum hyemale (Adam and Eve/ Putty Root), and Calopogon tuberosus (Tuberous Grass Pink). These species are all native to Central and Eastern North America.

Orchids are also banked in the Frozen Garden of CREW’s CryoBioBank, which is a liquid nitrogen bank used to preserve tissues of endangered species for the future. One of the species, Cyrtopodium punctatum (Cowhorn Orchid), was cryopreserved, then seeds were recovered and germinated in-vitro. While most of these orchids are kept in the Plant Conservation Division’s greenhouse, you can see one of the fully-grown Cowhorn Orchids from CREW blooming in Discovery Forest!