The purple fringeless orchid doesn’t really look like the tropical or subtropical orchids most of us are used to seeing. It’s a short plant, usually only about 1-3 feet tall, with a cluster of bright, pinkish-purple flowers jutting out of the top of the plant’s stem like spikes.
It’s also among the rarest orchid species in Virginia, and late last month, a pair of volunteer citizen scientists found four plants of the nearly extinct orchids in Sperryville, Virginia, about 75 miles southwest of D.C.
“I was so elated to find this huge purple orchid, I wanted to do cartwheels in the marsh,” Patty Lane, one of the two volunteers who found the endangered purple flower, said in a press release.
Lane, along with Kate Heneberry, was out searching for orchids as part of a volunteer-powered orchid survey put on by the Changing Landscapes Initiative and the Virginia Working Landscapes — both projects of the Smithsonian’s Conservation Biology Institute — along with the North American Orchid Conservation Center. Lane and Heneberry’s finding is the first time the project has ID-ed the rare orchids.
The purple fringeless orchid is ranked as critically imperiled in Virginia, meaning that there are estimated to be fewer than 1,000 plants left across the state, according to lead project scientist Iara Lacher. Lacher says that understanding where the orchids are found and how their populations are changing is like a canary in the coal mine. “If we can identify changes in the forest early on, that’ll help natural resource managers to properly protect the area.”
Joe Guthrie, who’s the field survey coordinator for the project, points out that in addition to being visually striking and attractive, the plants also “form an important link in a web of interconnected relationships in a forest.” Guthrie says that there isn’t much information available on these rare orchids, making a project like this all the more important and necessary. “We don’t know yet what we’re losing when it comes to the rare orchids that are out there,” he says.
The purple fringeless orchid species is declining in the southeastern and Mid-Atlantic area that it’s usually found in, and Smithsonian spokesperson Devin Murphy tells DCist that much of this is due to a loss of the orchid’s habitat. “These orchids need very moist soil, they’re usually found in wetlands,” she says.
Murphy says that by gathering data on where these orchid species are located, the project’s scientists can get a better picture of how Virginia’s habitats are changing, and how these changes are impacting native orchid species in the state. “This is the first time we’ve done an orchid survey, but we’re trying to see if we can find patterns in where the orchids are found and if those patterns can tell us anything about the habitat,” she says.
In addition to the purple fringeless orchid, the project is also trying to identify an additional 63 native Virginia orchid species, 33 of which are labeled as vulnerable or imperiled because of how rare they are.
Lane and Heneberry were trained by Smithsonian scientists on how to ID the different types of orchids and then went out into the field for a practice run before officially starting their surveys. They’re part of a growing trend of volunteers partnering with researchers to gather data and observations that advance scientific knowledge. In D.C., for example, these citizen scientists have conducted research on the cleanliness of the region’s rivers.
This also isn’t the only instance where local citizen scientists have made stumbled across a rare finding—last year, for the first time since 2010, citizen scientists spotted an American eel in a tributary of Rock Creek.
This story has been updated to reflect that the orchid is critically imperiled and to correctly describe the Changing Landscapes Initiative. It has also been updated with additional comment from lead project scientist Iara Lacher.
