Orchids are at the top of the chain, said Dr Dixon. They use the system, like us. They re actually useless to the system. Orchids harvest the environment around them. But the scientific side is enormously interesting, Dr Dixon continued.
Orchids are evolutionary pinnacles.
Encapsulated within them is information about the processes of how life on earth evolved. You can see in each species fantastic threads through time because they ve had to build to an enormous degree of complexity. There are no other plants on earth, collectively, that have these intriguing systems. All orchids that we know of have symbioses with fungi. Each orchid uses its own special fungus.