With their dazzling blooms, orchids are among the most famous and collected flowering plants on Earth.

But orchids are not just beautiful and rare. They can also provide clues into the broader health of global ecosystems.

From the outside, ecosystems can look healthy while species reproduction rates are quietly collapsing, due to a decline in the number of bees and other pollinators such as flies and wasps. That’s in part what makes pollination failure so dangerous – and so hard to detect.

However, orchids have a very specialised biology which allows them to act as early indicators of pollination decline. And as our recent research, published in the journal Global Change Biology, shows, they’re telling us pollination is under pressure and has been for a long time. This threatens everything from global biodiversity to ecosystem resilience and food production.

Most plants are flexible. If one pollinator disappears, another might fill the gap. But for many orchid species, there is no other pollinator.

Many orchid species rely on a single pollinator, or a very narrow group of them. To attract these pollinators, orchids use specific scents, colours and shapes.

Some orchids chemically mimic........

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