The Corpse Flower certainly earns its macabre title, but there is so much more to this foul smelling beauty...
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Transcript:
Oh my gosh! What died in here?
It's a what? A flower? I thought flowers were supposed to smell nice.
Well, not the corpse flower. It quite literally smells like death and, turns out, is just as fascinating as it is putrid. From our own Cockrell Butterfly Center, Jeff Cummins is a bit of an expert when it comes to the corpse flower. So I'll let him start the stinky story of our stem star with some stanky stats. Try to say that even once fast. Jeff, tell us about the corpse flower. Corpse flower is a morphophallus titanum and it's an aroid that comes from the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. Aroid plants are quite common in neighborhood gardens, but, you know, being from Sumatra is pretty exotic. So what's the first trait of the corpse flower that makes it even more unique than its origins? It's quite rare to find one blooming at any given time because each individual plant blooms maybe every 8-10 years or so. They only bloom as rarely as, give or take, once a decade? Okay, well surely they stay bloomed in all their glory long enough afterward to make it worth the wait, right? The flower itself will last for about 4-5 days, but there's one night that it's particularly smelly. So the smell will linger for a few days, but there's just one night that it's at its most potent. So the corpse flower doesn't steal the visual spotlight for long, but sure makes its horrible olfactory mark. But come on, Jeff, there's no way it smells as horrible as a dead body. Yes, it does. It smells very bad. Alright, so once every several years the corpse flower makes our nose wish it was dead. But what happens after the bloom ends? So after the flower is finished blooming, the flower will fade and just wilt away to nothing and then there's a corm underground which is like a big bulb, like a big potato. And from that it'll send up a new leaf and that is what regenerates the energy into the corm and allows it to bloom the next time. And it'll go through cycles of leaves for the next 8-10 years, building up enough energy to produce that one big flower. That's actually awesome. It sends up a little photosynthesis solar panel to pump energy into itself. Well, I'm being pedantic. I guess you could just call it, yeah, a leaf. Okay, surely the corpse flower has to perform some other useful function between blooms. Does it produce any fruit? So after the female flowers are pollinated it grows into these large red berries that are eaten by hornbills mostly in the wild, which are large bird. And they swallow the fruit and then excrete the seed and that becomes a new plant somewhere else further away. Can people eat these berries? The fruit actually is not poisonous, but I would not eat it. Are any parts of the corpse flower deadly? Other parts of the plant are toxic. It's got calcium oxalate crystals in it, so if you were to eat the green parts of the plant, it'd feel like you're eating glass. It's very painful. It can close up your throat and you'll choke. So you won't be poisoned, but you can choke from it. This is all so fascinating, Jeff. What is one last thing about the corpse flower that just reeks of intrigue? One thing that's kind of neat about it is it's got both the male and female flowers. It's not actually a single flower. It's actually hundreds and hundreds of individual flowers. So it's not considered the world's largest single flower. It's the world's largest inflorescence. So that means it's got hundreds of flowers altogether instead of just one single flower. And it's got the male flowers on top and then below it are the female flowers. And the male flowers open up first and kind of exude their pollen and a sticky substance, almost like toothpaste. And then once that has finished, then the female flowers open and become receptive. And that's to avoid self-pollination. So the flies and beetles come, collect that pollen and move on to another flower. Truly remarkable. You know, learning about the corpse flower has been a truly nose-opening experience. But I think I'm just going to crack a window until the next science bite. You've been listening to Science Bites, an HMNS production with your host today, Johnny Hemberger. If you'd like to have your heaping helping of Science Bites all in one place, just type in HMNS Science Bites into your favorite podcast app and be sure to subscribe. Thanks for listening and as always, stay curious.