What does it take to film something
that's never been filmed before?
And what if that something is high up in a tree, in the middle of a wild swamp,
in one of the most unexplored places in North America?
Well, this short documentary we're about to show you is about a team doing just that;
filming something that has only ever been hypothesized.
The pollination of the ghost orchid.
The mystery about this rare flower has actually become an obsession to solve.
But is it worth getting rained on while trudging through alligator and snake infested water?
for these guys...
that answer is a wholehearted "Yes".
Now from Grizzly Creek films,
this is Chasing Ghosts.
The Swamp itself is steeped in mystery.
Holding a wildness that is so increasingly rare in modern life.
There's this fairy-like, ghost-like thing dancing off the edge of a tree.
It just deepens the mystery.
It deepens the power of those places.
There's just nothing like it
the way as these curling tendrils in that long nectar stem, the artistry is in the form itself.
There are so few of them.
They're so endangered and so elusive that we hardly know anything about them.
We all have this inherent desire to know the answers.
This is something that is in our backyard that science doesn't know yet.
What pollinates the ghost orchid?
You know, this is the burning question that has outlasted generations of scientists.
This summer, we're like, you know what, if we're gonna do this, we got to go all in.
This team that's going about it in different ways.
We are up 50 feet in a cypress tree.
Carlton is having to wade through waist deep water and then paddleboard miles and heads.
The chase of this photo is definitely pushing all of us.
Your breaking point.
I don't actually know the ingredients of obsession.
Maybe it's a chance of trying something that seems impossible.
Orchids are the most diverse group of flowering plants in the world.
There are about 25 - 30,000 species.
The most iconic orchid pollination story is one that Darwin was interested in 150 years ago.
And it involves an orchid in Madagascar that has a nectar tube that's over a foot long.
And Darwin had predicted that a moth must have a tongue that's that matches the length
of the nectar tube.
This thing was so extreme that his
expression was "Good heavens, what insect can suck it?"
Here in South Florida. It's the most diverse place for orchids in the United States.
And so was really drawn to the ghost orchid because how little was known about it.
It's all about this game of enchantment.
You know, it's this nondescript twig like leafless plant growing on the side of a cypress
tree until it pushes this ephemeral ghost-like flower for the sole purpose of attracting a pollinator.
A super specific flower adapted and co-evolved to a super specific pollinator.
It's always been suspected that the giant Sphinx moth pollinates, the ghost orchid based
on the size of the moth, the length of the tongue, in a scientific sense, we need to
prove that.
This is the perfect embodiment of the scientific process.
Here's the theory.
Let's put it to the test.
Mack and I've been talking about trying to photograph ghost orchids being pollinated
going back to 2014.
Here's how I'm going to try to do it.
And the idea is actually to use camera traps and sleep out in the swamp for however long
it takes.
The hard part too, though, is that the ghost like the way those roots are and how old it is, and is all over
that, that's got to be a 50 year old orchid by the size of those roots.
It's a ghost orchid here in corkscrew swamp they've called the super ghost and that is
because it produces so many flowers every single year.
and has a massive roots that just spider out in all directions.
And it's not just one bloom.
It's not two blooms.
It can get up to 16 blooms at a time, which is insane.
I've got bud envy.
[laughter]
It's a nonstop moth party.
"Yeah"
Well, I hope it is.
Into the swamp.
"You got everything?" "Yeah, ready?"
When we started undertaking this project I called Peter, who is an expert in orchids
who worked for years on pollination attempts.
Peter's an animal, he actually went out in the swamp for weeks at a time and stood on
a ladder, aiming an infrared video camera at a ghost orchid,
patrolling different flowers, hoping something would come.
It was so frustrating for so long, that I was almost just ready to walk away from the whole
thing.
And then Mac, Carlton, were kind of like you know,
yeah, well, you're meant to do this.
We gotta do this.
I was ascending and Mac was coming up as well.
And he looked up the trunk and just saw a Giant Sphinx moth.
They are so camouflaged.
I don't I have no idea how Mac even spotted it.
The moth is sitting right there.
And we're kind of wondering, you know, is the sun going to set in this thing is it going
to take off and fly right to the orchid and pollinate it?
Tonight might be the night.
These ancient canopies that used to extend all over the southeast, they hold an entire
ecosystem.
This ghost orchid is a relic of that ecosystem of how it used to be.
I think for Mac, the chance to come here to Corkscrew, to go to this amazing ghost orchid
and try to put a camera trap there is something no one had even thought of doing.
And so while I'm having to climb up 50 feet to see and photograph mine, Carlton is by
water trying to make this image happen.
We're kind of on parallel pursuits to try to answer this question.
Part of the obsession for me, the biggest part of the intrigue, is where this orchid lives.
Because these are the wildest, most inaccessible places we have left in the state of Florida,
arguably, in the East.
They're these deep, flooded, remote swamps, twisted and gnarled trunks forming these cathedrals.
It's dark, it's green, it feels like you're in the Amazon, or in some other world.
Wading waist deep amongst alligators, panthers bears...it's really easy to get really wild,
really remote, really quick.
We're getting walloped. By down pour here.
here
actually loved it.
And they range like this.
It feels like the swamp comes to life and I do too.
I wouldn't be surprised if we get an inch of rain and we can actually see this swamp rise.
There is a really strange fervor about these orchids.
I didn't understand it at first, but I used to say "they" those people that are crazy about
this effort, I now have to say "we" because I'm doing things that I would never do. I stay
up at night. I cannot sleep.
The ghost orchid frenzy is real.
One in 10 of these ghost orchids actually produced a flower each year.
And of those one in 10 actually get pollinated.
So if you stack up the odds, and you'd have to put out 10 cameras on 10 different blooms
to have a probability of one moth coming
to moths are so rare. Is there even a moss in the vicinity that could pollinate this.
There's a reason why it hasn't been documented before and that's because it's really really
difficult.
...craziest thing just happened. I was looking down changing out my battery and then pop
up a pop up.
Camera went off 10 times I thought it was a false trigger.
Now I looked up in like 12 inches from my face.
There is a moth sitting on the orchid flower.
Scrolling through literally 1000s of photographs.
Had itty bitty moths, that they were just kind of hovering in space, medium sized moths landing
on the flower but no capability to get any nectar as a reward.
There's one photo where the orchid is bounces out of the frame down and out of the frame
up.
I'm like "What in the world is going on", and there's a little frog.
It was hanging off of it.
So you're getting like this window into this microcosm, that happens around this bloom.
So let's keep these cameras going.
Let's see what we have after the end of a couple months.
Just the ones that are about to open is 1, 2, 3, 4.
But then I count eight more after these four.
See what this baby's got. Yeah.
Go up, get to the camera.
I hit play.
And I started scrolling through images.
And I remember my heart jumping.
Yeah.
He's right across from me.
And I said, Peter, I've got I've got orange on the flanges.
He's like, what, as like, orange on the wings.
You looks at this.
And he goes, "Dude. You have the first ever photo of a Giant Sphinx moth at a ghost orchid"
So you have this elongated body of the giant Sphinx, kind of arching back and its wings
are spread and it's hovering.
And it's proboscis is out right in front of the orchids.
And it's just sitting there.
It's like it was just, it was just placed.
There are multiple frames of this giant Sphinx.
And I started looking at them closely. I zoomed in and looked at the face of this moth.
And it is covered, just covered with a different kind of pollen, pollinia, most likely from
a moon vine.
And I'm looking at it even closer, and I'm thinking, wow, you know, it's got its proboscis
all the way into this flower.
And yet, it's faces still an inch or two inches out of the flower.
Could it be that the giant Sphinx actually has a proboscis
that is almost too long to get its face into the orchid?
Could it be that the Giants Sphynx it's actually robbing nectar from this flower?
Peter and I were both like, you know, this kind of turns the whole theory on its
on its head.
This existing idea that this is the only pollinator is perhaps not actually providing any benefit
at all to the flower.
And that was a wild moment.
So discovery opens up this whole new kind of Pandora's box, there are all these other
things that add more questions.
We as humans, like a simple story, but it seems that at least in this case, reality
is a little more complex.
an hour, five in the morning.
One in the morning. 10pm, I cycled through a couple more nights and all of a sudden,
bam, there is a huge moth, right on the lip of this ghost orchid. It's huge.
There's a moth that was bigger than anything I expected to see.
It has so much weight when it lands it like brings the orchid down out of frame and then
back. A moth of that species visited this orchid three times.
So I shared these with Peter and colleagues.
And that's when everyone started getting really excited.
It was like so this is a giant Sphinx and I was like No, and he was just like, damn.
And I was like, Dude, it's way more interesting.
Like, this was never even suspected before.
You know, like I'd never even thought of that Fig Sphinx being pollinated.
There's pollinia on the face.
That's like that's the money shop.
These discoveries basically are unprecedented.
Each photo that Mac and Carlton get, lends a new perspective into the behavior.
And it's not just about ghosts now.
Pollination is critical to our livelihoods.
Good ol' Chuck Darwin would be proud of this.
Yes, there is a physical image at the end of the day, but it is the journey of getting
to that.
That is what's so rewarding.
And especially in a place that we care so much about.
Over the past three years, dozens of trips hundreds of hours.
I've fallen in love with these very specific corners of these remote swamps.
We still have these truly wild stories that the rest of the world doesn't know about.
Thanks for watching Seeker Indie's premiere of Chasing Ghosts.
It's stories like these that can inspire more discoveries, more adventures and new ideas
that may one day help save our planet.
Now let's talk to them.
We want to know what motivated them how it all came together.
And of course, how scary it was to film an alligator filled swamp.
I'm Eric Bendik and the series Producer here at Grizzly Creek films in Bozeman, Montana.
When I started working on a big feature project about the Florida Panther, Carlton started
putting a bug in my ear about this moth project that he wanted to spend an entire summer. He
had already spent a ton of time chasing this moth.
And I was kind of at first a little hesitant.
I was like, well, that seems like a lot of energy to pour into that.
Not to mention, you know, you're going into the swamp in the most hostile time of year
super wet, super mosquito-y.
And then of course, like everything's happening at night, and then for whatever reason that
ghost orchid just lures everybody in.
I mean, it's like this obsession that you just cannot shake.
As soon as someone puts the idea in your head.
It's like oh, yeah, well, we could do that we could carve out some time we'll figure
this out.
Yes, there's been quite a bit published since the film came out.
And it's been really exciting to see some of that work, get peer reviewed and figured
out. There's definitely ideas about using the applications of this technology for more studies,
not just of the ghost orchid, but other pollinators, which would be super cool to
see.
And then I think there's a bigger picture things going on, you know about people trying
to reassess like, what is this coevolution thing really all about?
Do we need to think about that in a broader way as maybe including more than just one
species, one plant or one tree?
Could it be broader than that?
So that's really exciting.
And that's kind of new in the whole field that we're working in.
My feeling on this next generation and people coming up in the wildlife world is really
focused on those stories that you think can make a difference. Really focus on a story
that feels urgent, a story that feels like if you don't tell it no one else will. Something
unique to the world.
And something that is really only happening now.
It doesn't matter if your production value or what camera you use, or all of those things
can fall away.
But if you have a really compelling story and an urgent story, it's going to find an
audience.
The biggest new project on my horizon, my immediate horizon, is a feature film about the Florida
Panther.
And this film has been about four years in the making.
And it's really the first time anyone has captured real behind the scenes kind of the
natural history and the plight of Florida Panther.
This was is Seeker Indie. Seeker's independent filmmaker showcase, keep coming back to see
what else we have in store and the amazing stories we continue to highlight.
Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on seeker.