Background

Alexandra Sulecki is interviewed here by Craig Branham, Doctoral Candidate at Saint Louis University, about her project and the experience of researching it.

CB: Usually when I think about "endangered species" I think about elephants, tigers, rhinos, and other land animals. What specifically drew you to endangered plants?

AS: I just began to love orchids while I was learning about them, but I don't know what drew me to plants. I seemed to have an ability to remember their names, and look at them and guess where they would live and who they would hang out with, that sort of thing. And my interest just built on that naturally.

CB: In the "Statement of the Problem" section of your proposal you were talking about "habitat destruction, changing local conditions, and pollinator loss and loss of mycorrhizal fungus populations"; all of which are not part of this study. What can you say about these other factors?

AS: About 70 percent of Collier County in Florida, where I live, is conservation land, but land is being developed here all the time and our urban boundaries are being pushed outward. The orchids are very habitat-specific; they require certain amounts of light, humidity, and water. As we build out on the land, we alter the hydrology, and this alters the habitat. Development takes away the trees; and even if the trees are spared, development causes more rain water, which the orchids need, to run off. So we're reducing the ability of the land to provide the conditions that the orchids need.

CB: Part of your argument is that there can be a "rare" plant species without it necessarily being a "disappearing" or "endangered" one.

AS: That's true. I had originally started this project with the idea of reintroducing native orchids. That was my original project proposal, which I was invited, by fortunate accident, to speak on at Selby Gardens in Sarasota. I gave a talk to a group of worldwide Orchid specialists--which had I known that that was who was in the room and who I was talking to, I would have been frightened to death--and I got some very good feedback from them. One of the most important things I learned was that as a scientist you can't go in and reintroduce something unless you know what's happening in there. That's why I decided to focus first on the population survivorship study, to go in and see what was happening. We may have reduced lands to support orchids, but the orchid populations on the lands out there may not be actually dwindling. But if I find out that something is happening to the numbers of orchids and the lands that are left to them, for whatever reason, it would justify going in and doing some restoration.

CB: What are some of the qualities of good research in the field in which you work? Since I know you started off as an English major before switching over to science, I thought it might be interesting to ask you how scientific research is different from research in literary studies.

AS: It is much different because you are not just working from your own impressions. In English, any impression that you have about a work of literature, as long as you can support it, is valid. In science you have to build your work on what has been done before. It's not so much a personal take on things. You're collecting facts, and maybe you have a unique idea to do something with those facts, but . . . but then, maybe it's not so different. That's a hard question. They both require you to think, but the science project requires you to have more of a knowledge of the facts, where literary research is more about impressions.