E19: New Species— of orchids from Australia that trick gnats into sex!

Dr. Noushka Reiter is a Senior Research Scientist at the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. She talks to me about her paper published in the May 13, 2021 issue of Phytotaxa in which she and her coauthors describe two new species of orchids from Australia!

We talk about why orchids are so popular, gnats trying to have sex with flowers, why orchids need fungi to grow, how to get small wasps to try to mate with random items in your house, and the challenges of finding orchids in southern Australia!

The title of the paper is “Two new species of Pterostylis (Orchidaceae; Orchidoidea) from the Sunset Country, Victoria, Australia.” The paper is currently available Open Access here: https://www.mapress.com/j/pt/article/view/phytotaxa.500.3.1