Hello everyone and welcome to the In Defensive Plants podcast, the official podcast of IndefensivePlants.com. What's up? This is your host, Matt, and I just want to start off by saying that I'm deeply saddened by the state of my country right now. And my heart goes out to everyone who is facing violence as they fight against prejudices. You know, Indefensive Plants is a botanical podcast, and it's here to celebrate the beauty and splendor of the natural world,

and to highlight all of the wonderful people that are fighting to protect it. But that doesn't work unless we all come to the table. Conservation like any other field requires a diversity

of backgrounds, interests, and cultures, getting involved to fight for what we all believe in.

All right, today I have something really interesting for you. We're going to discuss the ways in which very small flies have shaped and contributed to the

immense diversity of orchids in the tribe Plurothalidae.

Plothalids are super diverse, and it's hard to make generalizations, but a lot of them are very small

orchids, with incredibly complex and beautiful

floral structures. They also have extremely fascinating pollination ecologies. Joining us to talk about this

is Dr. Adam Caramens of the Lancaster Botanical Garden and Melissa Diaz Morales, a PhD student

at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology. You may recognize both of their names because they've been on the podcast before,

but today they're going to talk about a really cool paper that they just published with a set of

colleagues looking at some of the explanations for why this group of orchids is so diverse.

And along the way, we're going to learn a lot about some of the nuances of the scientific

publishing process that might be hindering our understanding of pollination, biodiversity, and really affecting

conservation in the long run. But before we get to that, I'm really excited to announce

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