A new study published in Biological Conservation suggests something that makes a whole lot of sense when you see a picture of its subject: one of the world’s weirdest orchids, which kind of looks like it has the face of a monkey at its center, has become a worldwide collectible among wealthy orchid enthusiasts who hear “limited edition” when they a plant can’t be found anywhere else on Earth except for remote mountain rain forests in Ecuador and Colombia.
It’s called the Dracula orchid, and I get the appeal. It’s beautiful, almost alien. Just one look at a lo-res picture, and I instantly understand why people will spend a fortune for one.
It looks like it hails from an alien planet. Maybe Pandora from the Avatar universe. If it were written into fiction, it would probably eat people. So, it’s no surprise that 91 percent of all known Dracula species have entered legal international trade since 1981, with more than 112,000 plants shipped across 52 countries.
One of the World’s Weirdest Orchids Is Being Loved Into Danger
Every single one of those orchids was listed as being artificially propagated and, rather conveniently, not one of them was reported as having been collected in the wild. How strange! Surely, none of them were ripped out of their natural habitats. The research team that exhaustively documented its trade isn’t calling anyone out, but they do bring up the fact that determining whether rare orchids were genuinely propagated or harvested in the wild is quite difficult.
This matters because, while there are a variety of species, it is exceedingly rare. Some live in just a single valley. One variety is so rare that there are only 17 of them currently in existence. And yet, for some species, there’s only a couple of years between their debut to the scientific community and their appearance in commercial trade. According to the researchers, one species was exported before it had even been given a name. Another one hasn’t even been seen after it was first described.
The researchers are not really calling anybody out specifically, but strongly hint at what’s really going on here and call for stronger protections and regulations, which currently allow them to be traded with permits; otherwise, a gorgeous, rare orchid species could be quickly harvested out of existence.
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