Poignant Comic Strip on a Bee Orchid

[epiphyte78]

Anybody a fan of xkcd? Saw this poignant comic strip on a bee orchid and thought I'd share it with you all.

Is it possible that the bee went extinct because the males preferred mating with the flowers?

Last night I watched a futuristic doomsday Korean movie where fertility rates were plummeting because people were preferring to partner up with robots.

Even better than the real thing?

You can choose x...or you can choose y. You can have your cake...or you can eat your cake...but not both. So there's always going to be an opportunity cost.

You have $20 in your pocket...you can choose Laelia speciosa or Mystacidium capense. Which one do you prefer?

Basically you have an idea of...heaven...but on earth. So you choose whichever option will result in the shortest distance between you and your utopia.

Like a kid in a candy store. The options before him reflect the utopia decisions of billions of kids before him. And his utopia decisions will influence the options of billions of kids after him. We can say that the options get better over time because kids give producers an incentive to come up with better options.

Centralizing these decisions increases the distance between most people and their utopia. Consumer sovereignty is the compass...without it we're lost.

Imagine if taxpayers could choose where their taxes go. We'd have a market in the public sector and people could shop for themselves.

You could choose x or y. Every dollar you give to the DoD is a dollar that you can't give to the EPA. So which one would result in the shortest distance between you and your heaven on earth? Attacking Syria or conserving orchid habitat?

Each taxpayer could be contributing to a community which would become more reflective of the kind of world in which he or she would like to live. Gaudeat Emptor! - Daniel J. Brown, The Case For Tax-Target Plans

Personally, my utopia would definitely have two things...

1. tax choice
2. an orchid on every tree.

Would your utopia have an orchid on every tree? Maybe every other tree?

I really wasn't planning on it...but I've given you plenty of discussion options to choose from! What are the chances that you're all going to want to discuss Ophrys apifera?

[CPKidofAugusta]

I don't know how much I care for that comic. What actually happened is that one or two mutant plants started to self pollinate and that allowed them to spread away from the bee's natural habitat. Self-pollinating Ophrys apifera is not an example of an evolved characteristic that the orchid was able to pull off in order to save its live but one in a million self-perpetuating malformation, and this has actually happened in more than one Orchid species. Take these two examples: Phragmipedium popowii and Phragmipedium exstaminodium or Phragmipedium lindenii and Phragmipedium caudatum, the only difference here being that the changes that made them self pollinating allowed separated the malformed plants into separate species. The bee itself is actually still quite alive (the Eucera family of bees). Even Kew gardens does not mention the bee being extinct on apifera's species page. Ophrys apifera's page at Kew does not even contain phrasing such as "This plant is entirely self pollinating," instead it says " In other Ophrys species in the Mediterranean region, for example, male bees or wasps try to copulate with the lip of the flowers, which look and smell like the females of their own species. However, in Britain and generally elsewhere, the bee orchid, is self-pollinated and the pollinia, which hang on a thread, are blown against the receptive surface of the stigma."

There's also the problem of the phrasing. This is not an orchid's "an idea of what the femal bee looked like to the male be as interpreted by a plant". The orchid is not even an accurate representation of the bee, only a display of enough characteristics to fool the male bee into thinking it's a female. We're talking Scarecrows and actual humans in the mind of a bird. The bird is fooled but there is very little resemblance between the two.

Reading that back I sound like an extreme know it all who's trying to show how right he is. I apologize for sounding rude and condescending.