by Kristen Minogue

There’s a reason orchids are called the smartest plants on Earth. Several, in fact, and not all of them good. Some orchids can be crafty, devious pretenders, using their fragrance to trick insects into pollinating them but giving no nectar in return (we’re looking at you, Dragon’s Mouth and Fairy’s Slipper). But most lessons from the orchid world are more encouraging. Many remain beautiful in winter and thrive after fire. In the final days of the semifinals of the Smithsonian Showdown, we’ve adopted a new motto: What Would Orchid Do? After all, they have been around for 80 million years. Any species that survived from the age of the dinosaurs has to have done something well.

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by Kristen Minogue

An old Ojibwe legend tells of a village visited by plague. It was the dead of winter and many died, including the village healer. To save the community, a young girl made a dangerous journey through the snow to find medicine for the sick. She succeeded, but on the way lost her moccasins, leaving a trail of bloody footprints in the snow. When spring arrived, the bloody footprints put forth moccasin flowers—better known today by their Western name, the lady’s slippers.

Origin stories of the lady’s slipper orchid exist among many Native American tribes, and the details change. (Were the flowers yellow or pink? Did she make the journey in place of her sick husband? Did the flowers come from her footprints, or the bandages on her feet?) But at the root lies a more basic question: What was so important about this orchid?

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William Swainson probably painted this orchid sometime between 1789 and 1855.

by Chris Patrick

Legend says it all started with a single orchid bloom. This bloom, an accident, sparked a phenomenon so pervasive in Victorian England that its name, orchid delirium, was shortened to orchidelirium, a d excised to indicate the oneness of orchids and madness.

The story begins like this: In 1818, a man named William Swainson sent plants from Brazil to London, using what he believed to be parasitic plants as packing material. When the package arrived, one of the plants was in bloom. Its vivid hue and strange shape were unlike anything most European eyes had ever beheld in the way of flowers. Europe fell in love. And so began orchidelirium, the European obsession with orchids. Click to continue »

A bluebird in a nest box.
(Matt Storms)

by Caroline Kanaskie

The Bluebird Project is one of my big focuses as the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s (SERC) citizen science intern. While organizing and analyzing data collected by citizen scientists, I can’t help but imagine the countless hours spent walking the trail between nest boxes from March to September that created this robust data set.

I want to show my appreciation by highlighting three wonderful volunteers involved with the Bluebird Project: Annie Johnson, Judy Bissett, and Dave Gillum. Click to continue »

by Chris Patrick

Rob Aguilar operates on a cownose ray. (SERC)

It’s 2 a.m. Rob Aguilar, biologist in the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s (SERC) Fish and Invertebrate Ecology Lab, meets a group of fishermen at a pound net in the Patuxent River. The net starts at the shore and juts far into the river. Fish traveling along the shore collide with the net and follow its length into a heart-shaped net at the end—the pound.

Today, the pound contains cownose rays. Not ideal for fishermen, but exactly what Aguilar wants. Last summer SERC researchers and collaborators surgically implanted acoustic tags in 31 rays to track their migration. This summer, they’re tagging 20 to 25 more rays from Maryland rivers.

Though native to the East and Gulf Coasts, much about cownose rays remains mysterious. Many fishermen and oyster growers consider rays a nuisance because they eat shellfish and travel in schools in the hundreds.

“The main conflict seems to be between guys who fish for oysters—especially aquaculture oysters because there’s a lot of money in that—and these rays they perceive as potentially eating up their profits,” says Matthew Ogburn, ecologist in the Fish and Invertebrate Ecology Lab. Click to continue »

Eric Hazelton in a Phragmites patch on the Nanjemoy River in Maryland. (Rebekah Downard of Utah State University)

by Chris Patrick

On crime scene investigation shows, DNA forensic scientists sit in a darkened room, wearing lab coats and clutching clear vials over dramatic music. In a matter of hours, they conjure perpetrators to the scene of a crime or prove relations between separated kin simply from remnants of genetic material.

Researchers in the Plant Ecology and Molecular Ecology Labs at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) published a paper in July in Wetlands that has more in common with a CSI episode than you’d expect—though in their case, the process took months instead of hours.

There’s a strain of Phragmites australis, the common reed, that’s native to North America. But the population of an invasive strain from Europe, introduced in the 1800s, suddenly boomed without warning in wetlands around the Chesapeake Bay in the 1980s. SERC scientists had some ideas about what might have caused the sudden explosion, so the team attempted to recreate the history of this sudden, aggressive invasion to test their theories. Click to continue »

by Chris Patrick

Red Lionfish. (Jacek Madejski)

The lionfish (Pterois volitans) resembles a psychedelic fish-shaped peppermint, striped in red and white and decked with feathery, fan-like fins. But its venomous spines and invasive-species status make it much less innocuous than candy.

Lionfish are native to the Indo-Pacific. They’re popular aquarium fish—it’s likely ex-aquarium-owners introduced them into the Atlantic. They spread rapidly along the southeastern coast of the United States, into the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.

Lionfish flourish in their introduced range, where they have no predators. They breed quickly—a female can produce up to two million eggs per year. They live a long time, sometimes more than 15 years. And they’ll eat basically anything that fits into their mouths, decimating populations of native marine animals with their voracious, indiscriminate appetites. When they arrive at a reef, they can reduce the number of native fish by 80 percent.

But lionfish may also be harmful to the native fish they can’t eat. A recently published PLOS ONE study reports that invasive lionfish are parasitized less than native fish. Click to continue »

by Chris Patrick

Lovers of both the Smithsonian and the selfie stick, rejoice! Though the infamous monopods are banned in Smithsonian museums and galleries, they’ve found a new arena of use: labs.

Well, in one lab at least. Researchers in the marine ecology lab at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) are using selfie sticks to record fish behavior without scaring them. SERC’s marine ecology team wants to see if fish raised in low-oxygen conditions acclimate to breathing less oxygen. “I have never heard of someone else using the selfie stick for science,” said Seth Miller, a postdoctoral fellow in the marine ecology lab and collaborator on the project. “Although it probably occurs. Ecologists are pretty resourceful.”

Ashley Collier records a fish without scaring it by using a selfie stick. (Chris Patrick)

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