Lorena Endara, a Florida Museum of Natural History research assistant, discusses why she became a biologist and what inspired her to research orchids in her home country of Ecuador.
Interview and videos produced by Erin Rauch for Explore Research at the University of Florida.
Transcript
Lorena Endara: I really was lucky to have a very encouraging and inspiring biology teacher in high school and he gave me a new perspective of biology, and so that’s why I went for a biology degree for my undergrad degree back in Ecuador.
In Ecuador, I always loved orchids. Orchids are fascinating, and again I come from a very orchid diverse country. So orchids are ten percent of our total flora. They have an incredible array of morphological variation, so to start from there it’s very interesting.
I have always been fascinated by the pollination mechanisms and how diverse they are in orchids and I always like to observe, when I was a kid or until now I really like to observe the interactions between plants and animals and pollination specialists. That’s what kept me going.
Orchids in the Andes
Transcript
Lorena Endara: My research explores the speciation patterns of Scaphosepalum Orchids. These small orchids grow in the Andes of Ecuador, Colombia, and Bolivia. It’s fifty percent of the species occur in Ecuador of this group. I am trying to explore these evolutionary relationships with DNA, and for these I use the tissues of the plants that I collect in the field, and also I use morphological data that I collect from specimens that are either brought from the field or that have been in collections like the one of the museum.
These orchids are vegetatively very similar to each other, but the flowers are very different. The pollination and the pollination mechanism are strongly correlated to the morphology of the flowers of this group. This is a very interesting example of how pollinators have driven the evolution and diversity among orchids. The pollinators of these small plants are small flies as well. They resembled fruit flies.
My results were very different from what I predicted. Initially I thought that species that live close together in the same environment were sisters or each other’s closest relatives, but it it seems that they are not their closest relatives, and they are just in that environment due to environmental factors. The results of the research are summarized in a tree that depicts the evolutionary history of the group. This resulting tree has been the basis or the framework to understand how the group speciated. From this tree we know that some species, or some groups or clades, are restricted to the northern part of the Andes and the western slopes on the Andes vs several other clades that are restricted to the easternmost sides of the Andes. I am able to observe the specimens or the species in the field and have a more comprehensive understanding of what I am reconstructing in the lab and in the herbarium.
During the time in the field I have been able to train students and also guides. Here in UF I have been able to make the collection grow with my specimens, and in general I think it gives us an understanding of how diversification and speciation worked in the Andes, especially in the neotropical orchids of this group.
Learn more about the University of Florida Herbarium at the Florida Museum
Lorena Endara’s research website
Explore Research at the University of Florida