Pink lady's slippers

Pretty orchids, locally found in undisturbed areas in limited patches. Once you've found where they like to be, you'll find them year after year. They are "exploitably vulnerable" in New York State, so "do not disturb" is the key to their continued survival. Note: with limited time, we didn't mention a few interesting points: 1) the hairiness (lots of trichomes, inside & out), which serves at least two purposes: a) it moves the insect in the direction the flower wants it to go -- toward the inside and then toward the reproductive bits (stigma and pollinia) -- a sort of botanical spike strip; and b) as protection from non-pollinating insects. 2) the color variations; pink and darker red forms are shown -- but white forms also exist (yes, white Pink lady's slippers). 3) why would the orchid do deception, especially when it doesn't seem to work? There are a couple ways the deception may work. First, new and naive insects may not have learned they're about to be fooled. But another way is that the signals are too good and too strong to be ignored... to do so would break the pollinator, and make it unable to interpret the world properly ("just do it"). In this, a bee would greatly tamp down its threshold for visiting signaling flowers -- and potential starve. Another consideration is that many flowers set up shop next to other species. This means pollinator packets may be incompatible some of the time (trillium to/from lady's slipper), but that they may get a occasional overflow (lady's slipper to/from trillium to/from lady's slipper), where some pollen from another of its kind "gets through". (There are trilliums and star flowers near these patches.) But it could be just that theydon't h ave much luck under normal circumstances, and do mostly root propagation.