Detroit plant shop cloning rare ghost orchids at risk of extinction
(CBS DETROIT) — This Halloween, we have a true ghost story, but it has nothing to do with spirits from the great beyond.
Rare Plant Fairy in Detroit is working on somewhat of a ghost story. While it does have a number of carnivorous plants, its crowning achievement has more to do with conjuring the dead and cloning than the "Little Shop of Horrors."
There are less than 1,000 of these rare ghost orchids left in the wild. They're getting new life in Detroit, hundreds of miles away from their natural habitat in the Everglades.
"We're hoping that with our work, by cloning it, we are able to bring it to the masses and indirectly saving the wild populations, hoping that they'll remain untouched," said Rare Plant Fairy founder Jocelyn Ho.
This isn't sci-fi. Ho and her team say they are working on a real solution to a real problem: plant poaching.
"People want what they can have, so this is mainly to offer to the collectors so that we deter poaching so that the value of the orchid isn't so sky high that maybe it's not even worth poaching," Ho said.
Ghost orchid callus cells, plant tissue comparable to stem cells in animals, are just now starting to resemble the plant structure they set out to clone two years ago.
"We started to propagate them. This is our media. Media has basically everything that a plant needs for food," said Rare Plant Fairy lab director Debbie Sweeney.
The incubation room is where they've stored several batches of propagated callus cells to find out if the clones will develop or die. It took some trial and error, but they've finally perfected their media recipe for ghost orchids.
"What we're really looking for, and this is kind of our end product of our two years of work, this is exactly what a tissue culture Ghost Orchid will look like," Sweeney said.
From here, they'll transition the clones into the nursery, experimenting with different conditions to find the right one to help the plant eventually flower. The clones would be extremely susceptible to disease in the wild, so rather than attempting to repopulate the depleted number of ghost orchids in South Florida, they'll use social media to sell the clones to plant collectors and hopefully preserve what's left of the originals.
"At the end of the day, plant collectors just want a healthy plant in their collection," Ho said.
The ghost orchid clones might not look like much right now, but the Rare Plant Fairy team plans on continuing its work to raise one that will eventually flower. It might take a full year to pull it off, but it will certainly result in an amazing treat for lucky plant collectors.