ALTHOUGH many plants self-fertilise, a rare orchid that grows on tree trunks in China takes the process to hitherto unknown heights. Through a gymnastic feat never seen before in plants, it bends its pollen-containing male anther round through a full circle before jabbing it into the female stigma to complete fertilisation.
At 60 days, the act takes even longer than Tantric sex. LaiQuiang Huang and his colleagues at Tsinghua University in the city of Shenzhen spotted the painstaking process in 1900 flowers of the orchid Holcoglossum amesianum. Unlike all other forms of self-pollination which require assistance from wind, gravity, insects or secretions, this orchid鈥檚 is entirely mechanical. 鈥淲e never witnessed an insect visiting the flowers, or wind assisting anther movement,鈥� they say in Nature (vol 441, p 945).
