(CBS DETROIT) — This Halloween, we have a true ghost story, but it has nothing to do with ghosts from the afterlife.
Rare Plant Fairy in Detroit is working on a ghost story of sorts. While it features some carnivorous plants, its crowning achievement has more to do with summoning the dead and cloning than the “Little Shop of Horrors.”
There are fewer than 1,000 of these rare ghost orchids left in the wild. They are finding new life in Detroit, hundreds of miles away from their natural habitat in the Everglades.
“We hope that with our work, by cloning it, we can bring it to the masses and indirectly save the wild populations, hoping that they remain untouched,” says Jocelyn Ho, founder of Rare Plant Fairy.
This isn’t science fiction. 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 can prevent poaching, so that the value of the orchid is not so sky-high that it might not even be worth poaching,” said Ho.
Ghost orchid callus cells, plant tissue similar to stem cells in animals, are only now beginning to resemble the plant structure they set out to clone two years ago.
“We started spreading them. This is our media. The media basically contains everything a plant needs for food,” said Debbie Sweeney, director of the Rare Plant Fairy lab.
In the incubation chamber, they stored several batches of expanded callus cells to find out whether the clones will develop or die. It took some trial and error, but they 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 transfer the clones to the nursery, experimenting with different conditions to find the right conditions for the plant to eventually flower. The clones would be extremely susceptible to disease in the wild, so instead of trying to repopulate the depleted number of ghost orchids in South Florida, they will use social media to sell the clones to plant collectors and hopefully preserve what is left is from the originals.
“Ultimately, plant collectors just want a healthy plant in their collection,” says Ho.
The ghost orchid clones may not look like much right now, but the Rare Plant Fairy team plans to continue its work to breed one that will eventually bloom. It may take a whole year to complete, but it will certainly result in a great treat for happy plant collectors.