July Monthly Meeting - Sex, Lies and Parasites:Sexual Deception in Orchids with Steve Beckendorf, UC Berkeley

The talk is about the devious ways that orchids fool their pollinators even to the point of masquerading as a female insect so that the males will try to mate with the flower thereby transferring from one flower to the next.

As a geneticist and developmental biologist at the University of California, Berkley, Steve has worked on the mechanisms that define tissues and organs in early animal embryos.  Because of this background, he has been interested in several scientific aspects of orchids, including molecular taxonomy and deceptive pollination strategies.   Steve is a director of the Orchid Conservation Alliance and an accredited AOS judge.