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Family tree for orchids explains their astonishing variability

Orchids, a fantastically complicated and diverse group of flowering plants, have long blended the exotic with the beautiful. Most species live on trees, often in remote, tropical mountains. Their flowers can be strange — one even flowers underground, and many species deceive their pollinators into thinking they are good to eat.

Some are florist's staples, like phalaenopsis, the hot-pink and white flower that is easy to grow and easier to sell. Beyond the "job" of looking beautiful, only the vanilla orchids have any commercial role. The estimated 25,000 orchid species outnumber mammals, reptiles and birds combined.

Previously, botanists have proposed more than a half dozen explanations for this diversity. Now, research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published last week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, corroborates many of these explanations, but finds no evidence for other logical suggestions, such as that deceitful pollination.

"It was surprising that many classic characteristics of orchids — the tiny, dust-like seeds, the role of fungi in triggering germination, the fused male-female flower parts that define the orchid flower — did not trigger the acceleration in species formation," says Thomas Givnish, a professor of botany and first author of the new study.

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