Julie Radford

speaker

161 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 14 Aug

Julie Radford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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What The Duck?! · Its survival relies on idiotic male wasps bonking it · 31 Jul 2026 podcast

And then I'll go back again to look at the flowering rates.

And then after flowering, do some hand pollination if I need to get some seed.

Or I will actually do some natural pollination monitoring as well to see whether or not natural pollinators are out there doing their job so that we can have seeds set.

It is, you know, it's a pretty amazing feeling when you've gone to all of this trouble of all of the work that goes into it behind the scenes to get these plants to grow.

And then you put them back out in the wild, knowing how rare they are.

You know, for this particular one, there's only...

two other individuals that we know of in that whole area, to have planted out so many and then to have so many succeed, but then also on top of that to have them flowering and getting naturally pollinated, it's probably the ultimate high for me in the work that I do because that is the aim, is to increase those populations so that they don't become extinct.

The estimate's probably about 200 individuals.

The important thing I think to note too is that genetically these are pretty much all the same.

The first lot of planting that was done, that was from one seed batch that was grown.

Ideally, the best way that we can help these orchids is to be locating new populations and new individuals whereby I can cross-pollinate and get new genetic material involved in the propagation.

No, I wouldn't say that it's the most complicated.

So one species that I work on, which is the MacGyver spider orchid, it's a very rare species from this region.

I'm talking about two individuals that occur on a private property.

And even though we've known about the two individuals now for about 16 years, they have never flowered at the same time.

So I'm still waiting for the day that both of these plants will produce a flower so that I can cross-pollinate them.

So I might be waiting for another 20 years and it may never happen in my lifetime.

Now, if you add plants of flowering at the same time, but then also...

that particular wasp needs to have emerged from its pupa at the same time as the plants are flowering.

So something like climate change might throw that balance off by a couple of weeks and then thereby you might have a situation where you don't get any natural pollination occurring in the wild for that year.

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