Ophrys, or Of Seduction
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‘I tried by placing my gloved finger on the summit of the labellum, with the tip just projecting beyond its margin, and then gently moving my finger it was really beautiful to see how instantly the pollinium was projected upwards, and how accurately the viscid surface of the disc struck my finger and firmly adhered to it.’
– Charles Darwin (1862)
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With gentle, sometimes clumsy, sometimes tender contact, Darwin experimented with different levels of touch during his research on the fertilisation of orchids. In each experiment, the scientist discovered new ways of simulating the insect and stimulating the flower as a means of determining the degree of sensitivity to penetration. Darwin, therefore, was intimate with his flowers. In the process, he learned to measure perceptual differences between organisms and provoke a response from the plants. As he was involved in pollination, Darwin himself was transformed into a pollinating insect. In their study ‘Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters’, Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers put forth a theory of ‘affective ecologies’ that covers the interactions between plants, animals and humans. The authors’ use of the word ‘involution’ refers not to an inverse or backwards evolution but an involved one: a coevolution of organisms defined not by competitive pressures (as the Darwinian theory of evolution has been traditionally interpreted) but by affective, intimate relations.
Hustak and Myers demonstrated the interdependence of apparently unrelated forms of life, drawing from Darwinian and neo-Darwinian accounts of contact between orchids and insects as well as controversial research on plant communication. This type of link required a reconsideration of the dynamic between a human subject who conducts an experiment and the object of study. That is, Darwin became a participant in his own experiments with orchids, and through this experimentation, all parties were transformed.
In his original study, Fertilisation of Orchids – or, if faithful to the flourishes of the original title: On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects – Darwin proves that a plant species seduces another organism, like insects, in order to reproduce. What for one individual is an act of nutrition is, for the other, one of reproduction. Identifying different strategies of visual display on the part of orchids, the scientist saw that some of them, like those of the Ophrys genus, attract insects without even offering the reward of nectar. For the first time, a plant was presented not as a mere passive receptor but as an active, playful participant in the manner of displaying itself: a strategic choice that through a process of evolution generates new forms of visual eroticism to seduce an insect.
Later, in 1916, an Algerian botanist named Maurice-Alexandre Pouyanne carried out more detailed observations on the fertilisation of various Ophrys orchids: he perceived how the Ophrys speculum flowers adopted the appearance of a wasp exposing its abdomen, while emitting sexual pheromones specific to the female insect during mating season. Pouyanne observed that solitary male insects tried to copulate with this wasp-flower. After several fruitless attempts to pair up, the male would take flight, often with the pollinia or sex organ of the flower adhering to its body. Thus a mode – the floral one – of trans-species ‘transvestism’ was identified for the first time.
The lure, both visual and aromatic, of orchids in the Ophrys genus has become a textbook case of the evolutionary strategy scientifically described as ‘sexual deception’: a form of ‘Pouyannian’ mimicry, named after the scientist who made this discovery. Described as ‘aggressive mimicry’, this strategy allows Ophrys orchids, as scientific papers have it, to ‘exploit’ the sexual tendencies of male insects to their own ends. In descriptions published in prestigious journals since the beginning of the century and practically up to the present day, orchids appear as ‘cheats’ involved in a ‘sexual swindle’ (Schiestl, 1999). The insects are identified as ‘dupes’ that have fallen for a signal faking the scent of their females (Ackerman et al., 2023). Another article demonstrates the costs that sexual deception has for the pollinators: in orchids that ‘sexually deceive’ (including Ophrys and similar genera), males even come to ejaculate falsely, ‘wasting sperm’. This implies that the pollinators are evolutionary ‘victims’ of the orchid’s strategy, as they suffer ‘a direct loss without any benefit’. This series of descriptors, from criminal law or the sphere of economics, makes clear the power of language when forming the account and the scientific gaze. When the metaphors through which we see the world are not revised, inherited and often obsolete concepts can prevent us from perceiving what is before us. And the opposite, too: new metaphors are able to create new ways of understanding and thus new realities.
By default, the scientific gaze has been anthropocentric and therefore androcentric: the projection of the human concept of ‘sex role’, especially when applied to reproductive strategy and the care of offspring, implicitly reinforces gender binary and another related binary: active/passive. These binaries, when applied to animal and plant species, leads to biases and negligence in observing non-human behaviours that exist outside these binaries (Ah-King & Ahnesjö, 2013). We can see it in the realm of fish, where the care of offspring falls chiefly on males, or in the homosexual behaviours of birds, which, prior to these theoretical revisions, were little observed or entirely neglected. The history of research on sexual selection shows how theory shapes what we perceive and do not perceive in nature (Gowaty, 1997; Dewsbury, 2005; Tang-Martinez and Ryder, 2005; Tang-Martinez, 2010). With regard to Ophrys, ‘reproductive mimicry’ may be considered a less moralising metaphor than ‘aggressive mimicry’. The transgression of identities turns out to be threatening.
While I investigate the topic, I ask myself the reason for so heightened a moralising analysis of the orchid’s behaviour, and not the inverse. Why, for instance, do the various acts of seduction by male individuals (of any species) that fail to produce a satisfactory relation – whether of nutrition or, even less so, of reproduction – not bear the same punitive labels as ‘cheat’ or ‘sexual deception’ despite being a waste of energy and time for the females forming part of their orbit?
I return to my biology papers, specifically those on ‘drones’. Drones have a specific role within the bee colony: their only function is to impregnate the queen and only one of them succeeds in impregnating her. The drones don’t work, don’t gather honey or pollen and rely on the worker bees for food. It’s been estimated that one drone can consume approximately four times the food of one worker. They do serve, however, an evolutionary purpose: to guarantee that the queen has a diverse, strong genetic pool for her descendants. As the drones are a drain on the community, they are tolerated only while there are queens to impregnate; in winter, the workers expel them from the hive. Moral judgement in the literary history of these males is typically applied to their laziness, but it does not carry the strong connotations associated with terms such as ‘cheat’ or ‘useless parasite’. If we shift this model to the arena of human subjectivity, men might be similarly judged. They are individuals who invest some energy in seduction, but without that energy always translating into a solid bond or into a significant contribution to their ‘colony’ (community, partner, family, social group). Applying an exercise symmetrical to the moral judgement of orchids, this class of seduction would be fraud in the shape of deception or false advertising: men project attractive qualities that they do not possess, or aren’t actually available.
Seeking more information on the topic, I find an article titled ‘Darwin’s Orchids: Evolution, Natural Law, and the Diversity of Desire’, categorised under both Queer Theory and Evolutionary Biology. Curiosity makes me seek out the author’s profile:
Donovan O. Schaefer, Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research explores the connections between affection, materiality, science and secularism. His first book, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution and Power (2015), advocated for an approach to affect theory that takes animality seriously as a model for understanding subjectivity.
The distinctiveness of the profile makes me delve deeper: Schaefer uses orchids to illustrate that evolution is not only competition and survival, but also attraction, pleasure and variation. In fact, other authors have interpreted the orchid-insect relationship as a metaphor for an ‘alternative motor’ of evolution: a positive force of attraction which operates because of variation (instead of despite variation). In the words of Nicole R. Armstrong, Darwin’s obsession with the orchid and the wasp implies an evolutionary mechanism based on pleasure and selection by attraction rather than simple utilitarian struggle. This trans-species desire – the flower desiring the pollinator and vice versa – makes coevolution possible. Schaefer’s central thesis is this: just as orchids unfold a variety of forms to joyfully attract insects, the diversity of human desire can be seen as one more product of these creative evolutionary mechanisms. The author recalls contemporary research (like that of the biologist Joan Roughgarden) that documents an enormous diversity of sexual behaviours and gender in animals and plants, and challenges any attempt to draw a clear line between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ in sex. From fish that change sex (labridae) to species with more than two functional reproductive sexes or flexible sexual roles not based in the male-female binary, modern biology strengthens what Darwin already noted: nature experiments constantly with sex and gender, without being reduced to any single pattern. These examples help to fuse Schaefer’s thesis: continual evolutionary variation is demonstrated as much in anatomy as in behaviour and desire, and so we cannot treat any concrete form of sexuality as a fixed norm.
The biologist Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) questioned the predominant view of evolution based exclusively on competition and natural selection, proposing that symbiosis had a fundamental role in the origin of biological complexity. Even though orchids were not her area of specialisation, it’s likely that she saw their relationship with bees as an example of coevolution and interdependence. She herself emphasised how the survival of the species is founded on the sometimes surprising and often perverse behaviour of millions of bodies, each one of which contains hundreds or even thousands of millions of demanding sexual cells (Margulis, L. Sagan, D., 1992).
If Lynn Margulis were to rewrite the famous final paragraph of Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species*– I speculate – it would be similar to this:
It is fascinating to contemplate an entangled ditch, where the roots of multiple plants are interlaced under the earth and the mycelia of the roots, invisible to the eye, help the trees to exchange chemical signals redistributing nutrients, while at the surface and on the trunks, lichen with their dual identities as algae and fungi convert stones into fertile ground. On the fertile ground, flowers, with such sophisticated strategies, perform the most varied and specialised spectacles for their pollinators: a mass of choreographies of provision, hunting and seduction that includes chanting, adornment, chemical resonance and deceit. I reflect on how these interdependent forms of life, which have emerged not only through natural laws but through a history of creative affinities, can transform our way of viewing life. In their broadest sense, these laws include growth and reproduction, inheritance and variability, but also networks of social exchange, the fusion of cells into new forms of life, the symbioses that bring about new species and their capacity to synthesise and transcend the realms of the plant and animal worlds, of life and of death. So, not only have Darwin’s ‘competition, death and hunger’ shaped the diversity of living beings, but also mutual dependency and the ability to share a dynamic equilibrium: a dance from the most subtle seduction to the most roguish audacity. There is grandeur in this transvestite, artful, mutualistic and altogether picaresque view of biology, with its several strengths, breathed first into a few forms of life or into just one; and while this planet has continued turning according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning infinite forms most beautiful, monstrous and wonderful continue to expand in an embodied echo of millions of intertwined generations.
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*‘It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.’
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Alicia Kopf is a writer and artist based in Barcelona. She published her first short story collection in 2011, Maneres de (no) entrar a casa. After her first individual exhibition, at the Joan Prats Gallery in Barcelona, she has participated in many collective exhibitions at CCCB, MACBA and the Tàpies Foundation, among others. Her first novel, Germà de gel (L´Altra Editorial, 2016), was awarded the Documenta Novel Award 2015, the Bookseller Award 2016, the Ojo Crítico Award 2016 and the Cálamo Award 2016 and became an international phenomenon. Her second novel, Memòria d’Eco (L’Altra, 2026) is already one of the most anticipated novels of the year.
Laura McGloughlin has been a freelance translator from Catalan and Spanish since completing a Masters in literary translation at the University of East Anglia, and was awarded the British Centre for Literary Translation Mentorship in 2011, mentored by Peter Bush. Among others, she has translated work by Bel Olid, Flavia Company, Joan Brossa, Andrea Mayo and Empar Moliner and her work has appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Asymptote, Metamorphoses and The Letters Page. She was Translator in Residence at the BCLT in 2022. Her most recent translation is a co-translation of Anna Pazos’s Killing the Nerve.
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