it isn’t really exciting to actually
have been able to take them out of the
bottles because we were very careful I
can’t touch them it might fall they
might break so the fact that we were
able to open them and take the things
out and go through the leaves it was a
fun experiment
Fairchild tropical botanic garden is
trying to grow a million orchids to do
that they have to grow a lot more than
that because of the survivability of
these orchids is not that high in order
for us to grow a million the students
have to do a hundred of the setups and
it’s very difficult for one place to do
that on their own so trying to get all
the schools out there to to participate
and to have their own setup late 1800s
Early 1900s there were thousands of
orchids on a daily basis being pulled
out of the forests here in South Florida
all the way to the Everglades those
orchids were unloaded by the thousands
on boxcars sent up to northern cities
here in the United States as disposable
house plants they seemed like an
unlimited resource there were so many
orchids here in South Florida but you do
that enough times year after year and
eventually the populations are depleted
there’s really no hope that they’ll come
back in large numbers unless they have
some help so with a million orchid
project we want to just do that sudden
large boost of the orchid populations we
want to get so many of them out there
that they’ll stand a chance
each sorted fruit or seed pod has about
two or three million individual seeds
those seeds are like dust they can blow
thousands of miles in the wind but they
have to land in just the right spot with
just the right level of light just the
right level of moisture in a seed pod of
two or three million seeds probably five
or ten of them will actually land where
they need to be to grow the great thing
about a micro propagation lab like this
is we can use artificial conditions to
make all of those seeds grow so we can
take all of those individual seeds and
put them into bottles with growth medium
that gives them just the right mixture
of chemical just the right level of
moisture that they would find in the
bark of a tree and we can give them just
the right level of light from one seed
pod we can produce thousands and
thousands of individual orchid plants so
having a lab like this allows us to tip
the odds way in our favor of producing
enough orchids to repopulate the
community you’ve got them out here in
the big world so we’re going to need to
protect them now
great to involve students because we
think that this project is really the
way conservation is going in the future
that this is conservation in places
where people live where people work
where people study with the call there’s
be able to see all this so close so we
really been told by the past generation
that we’re the inheritors and
ambassadors of the world so I really do
think that um it’s a lot of our
responsibility to correct the mistakes
that have been done in the past maybe if
there’s just enough of us passing on the
message and doing the right thing then
maybe we can make a difference these are
the orchids that we would have seen here
if we were here 150 years ago on all of
the oak trees all the mahogany trees we
would have seen native orchids
throughout the area so the idea is to
get them back to that critical mass
where you’ll see them everywhere and be
enough that they’ll seed themselves
have been able to take them out of the
bottles because we were very careful I
can’t touch them it might fall they
might break so the fact that we were
able to open them and take the things
out and go through the leaves it was a
fun experiment
Fairchild tropical botanic garden is
trying to grow a million orchids to do
that they have to grow a lot more than
that because of the survivability of
these orchids is not that high in order
for us to grow a million the students
have to do a hundred of the setups and
it’s very difficult for one place to do
that on their own so trying to get all
the schools out there to to participate
and to have their own setup late 1800s
Early 1900s there were thousands of
orchids on a daily basis being pulled
out of the forests here in South Florida
all the way to the Everglades those
orchids were unloaded by the thousands
on boxcars sent up to northern cities
here in the United States as disposable
house plants they seemed like an
unlimited resource there were so many
orchids here in South Florida but you do
that enough times year after year and
eventually the populations are depleted
there’s really no hope that they’ll come
back in large numbers unless they have
some help so with a million orchid
project we want to just do that sudden
large boost of the orchid populations we
want to get so many of them out there
that they’ll stand a chance
each sorted fruit or seed pod has about
two or three million individual seeds
those seeds are like dust they can blow
thousands of miles in the wind but they
have to land in just the right spot with
just the right level of light just the
right level of moisture in a seed pod of
two or three million seeds probably five
or ten of them will actually land where
they need to be to grow the great thing
about a micro propagation lab like this
is we can use artificial conditions to
make all of those seeds grow so we can
take all of those individual seeds and
put them into bottles with growth medium
that gives them just the right mixture
of chemical just the right level of
moisture that they would find in the
bark of a tree and we can give them just
the right level of light from one seed
pod we can produce thousands and
thousands of individual orchid plants so
having a lab like this allows us to tip
the odds way in our favor of producing
enough orchids to repopulate the
community you’ve got them out here in
the big world so we’re going to need to
protect them now
great to involve students because we
think that this project is really the
way conservation is going in the future
that this is conservation in places
where people live where people work
where people study with the call there’s
be able to see all this so close so we
really been told by the past generation
that we’re the inheritors and
ambassadors of the world so I really do
think that um it’s a lot of our
responsibility to correct the mistakes
that have been done in the past maybe if
there’s just enough of us passing on the
message and doing the right thing then
maybe we can make a difference these are
the orchids that we would have seen here
if we were here 150 years ago on all of
the oak trees all the mahogany trees we
would have seen native orchids
throughout the area so the idea is to
get them back to that critical mass
where you’ll see them everywhere and be
enough that they’ll seed themselves
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