I found some tiny orchid seedlings, maybe of Leochilus puertoricensis, "in situ" in a single thin branch

Today I took some photos of the flowers of Leochilus puertoricensis and uploaded them to the Internet.  I was asked to take photos of the whole plant.  I went to see the plants and moved around the tree to try to get a better angle for the photos.  Then I noticed tiny green slivers on one of the branches.  They turned out to be orchid seedling.  I have never seen so many orchid seedling or such tiny ones.  Most were only green blades.  A single one had a short root.  My suspicion is that they are seedling of Leochilus, since they are in the same tree with plants of this species.  However I have never seen so many Leochilus plants clumped together, usually they occur as solitary plants.  I suspect the reason there are so many of them there is that it is the dry season and slugs and snails, which love to snack on these things are not very active due to the low humidity.  I will watch these tiny plants to see how many of them survive and how long they take to reach maturity and bloom.

Leochilus puertoricensis M.W. Chase 1986, today I found three plants in the trees around my garden

This small orchid can be found sporadically growing on the Camasey trees that surround my garden.  They are short lived for an orchid.  In last year dry season, all the plants I knew died, some young plants were unable to survive the unusual severity of the dry season, other had already bloomed and fruited and were larger but this didn't seem to help them.  Today I found three plants, I will monitor them to see how they fare in the coming year.

To bloom before dying, the precarious life of twig epiphytes

A Dendrophylax that is in a piece of bark the tree has shed sends a root toward the nearest branch

A Miconia tree trunk showing the bark that is about to be shed.

This Leochilus is kept in place by its numerous roots even though
the base of the plant is not attached to the tree

In trees that don't shed their bark the branches can become literally
 carpeted with all manner of epiphytic plants

Tillandsia seedlings in a twig of an orange tree. 

A Campylocentrum has found a favorable spot on a branch and is fruiting heavily.  The Ionopsis on the smaller branch will probably fall along with the dead branch in which it is growing.

Most people picture the life cycle of epiphytic orchids as one that is fairly sedate.  They have the impression that once an orchid germinates in a tree it can spend decades growing and blooming seasonally with little change to its circumstances.   This is true for many species, but not for all.   In particular, the life of orchids that prefer to grow in twigs is a race to bloom before the tree sheds the bark or the twig dies.

Why would an orchid grow under such precarious circumstances?  My own guess is that these orchids are exploiting a niche where they face little competition from other plants.    I have observed that the local orchids sometimes develop such extensive root systems that they alone can keep the plant attached to the tree when the twig or branch dies.  Also, they seem to bloom while quite small, no seven year wait to reach adult size and bloom with these orchids.  However even with all these adaptations life is precarious for these orchids, if one walks on the forest after a particularly windy storm it is common to find fallen twigs often with Ionopsis orchids on them.  In the forest around my house you can find Dendrophylax, Ionopsis, Campylocentrum and Leochilus in the branches of Miconia and Guava trees.

Leochilus puertoricensis a small epiphytic orchid endemic of Puerto Rico

The flowers are green these look slightly yellowish because they were photographed when full sun was shining on them

You can see on this plant the remains of two inflorescences that failed to set seed

In this case the inflorescence is long enough to bring the flowers out of the shade

Two plants growing and blooming on a branch of a guava tree.

A plant growing on a guava branch

The first time I saw this small orchid was about twenty five years ago in El Cañon de San Cristobal.  I was hiking along the Cañon’s floor when I came across a tiny plant of this species lying on the ground with the remains of the twig it had been clinging still attached to its roots.  I was fascinated with the tiny plant and took the took it home.  A few weeks later I was surprised when an inflorescence came out of the plant that up to that time I had thought belonged to a seedling Oncidium altissimum.  When the first inflorescence lost its flowers the plant bloomed again.  I didn’t know the identity of the orchid as at that time there was not much information around on native orchids.  The plant died a few months after it finished blooming and I always wondered what I had done to make the plant die under my care.  For many years afterwards I never saw this orchid again, even when I visited and camped in areas that are within its geographical area of distribution.  This Leochilus was described in 1986 as Leochilus puertoricensis by Mark W. Chase.

In 1999 I started working as leader of the captive propagation program of the Puertorrican parrot project so I moved to the aviary which is in the heart of the Rio Abajo forest.  I was always on the lookout for this orchid but for the first few years I never saw it.  Then one day as I was walking around the aviary grounds I noticed a tiny orchidaceous leaf sticking out of the moss covered base of a Croton ornamental bush.  Intrigued by the leaves I started searching the area and found several seedlings growing in the stems of the Croton bushes.  In due time these orchids bloomed, set seed and then died.  I have seen this cycle repeated several times in the eleven years that I have lived at the aviary.  You find a few scattered seedlings on guava or Miconia trees, the seedlings grow rapidly, bloom, produce seed capsules, scatter the seed and then inevitably die.   One baffling characteristic of this species is that the plants always die after blooming and setting seed, even those plants that seem to be in places that appear to be ideal for their continual long term survival.

At this moment in the aviary you can’t find any plants of this species in any of the trees that have hosted them in the previous years.  You can say the same thing about Campylocentrum, Ionopsis and Tolumnia orchids in the aviary, in my early years in the aviary they were so common I never gave them a second though, now with the exception of Ion. satyrioides all have disappeared from the area of the aviary.  I only hope I am still here the day they return.

Leochilus puertorricensis is not in cultivation or has any horticultural importance but on rare occasions you can find wild collected plants in orchid collections.  Every time you can see that the roots are still attached to remnants of their twing or branch perch.   So far I have known of no plant that has shown long term survival in captivity even when the plants were put into a trees in areas where this species grows naturally.