This gigantic plant smells like fish guts, hides its flowers under a thick leaf,
and only blooms for 0.01% of its life. It makes no evolutionary sense. It kinda seems to be the
invention of a goth wizard, but in reality is the culmination of millions of years of evolution.
Cover your nose and come in, this is the corpse flower.
Hi, I’m Tasha the Amazon and you’re watching Animalogic.
Flowers are in the business of being attractive. Their entire point is to
get animals to get animals to come to them to pollinate them.
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of the video to find out how you can get up to 50% off your subscription.
Titan arum, or the corpse flower, has evolved to attract some of pollinators
that we would rather not have around Most pollinators are attracted by sweet,
energy-rich nectar, but some others are tricked into pollination.
Bee orchids catfish bees into an awkward date,
drake orchids mimic female wasps to get male wasps to land on them to chill,
but other plants use flies as pollinators. The lives of flies are nasty, brutish, and short.
By the time they can fly their only purpose is to reproduce, before dying a few days later.
Some species eat decomposing meat and lay their eggs in it so that the larvae will have a ready
source of nutrition when they hatch. These are the species that corpse flowers target.
The plant’s job is to mimic rotten meat as closely as possible, so that flies will land
on it and pollinate it. Corpse flowers are amazing at this. From the point of view of an insect brain
they’re indistinguishable. They smell like dead flesh,
they’re warm to the touch, and they’re bright red and moist on the inside.
We wanted to see it and smell from up-close, so we went to Gage Park,
in Hamilton, Ontario (ALT: Hamilton, Canada) where a giant corpse flower was in bloom.
And there it was, blooming in a greenhouse in the middle of the Canadian winter,
a mere 15,000 km away from its homeland of Sumatra.
They only bloom for up to 48 hours every few years, so seeing one was very lucky.
Every time one blooms at a greenhouse, thousands of people come to see it.
Thousands more watch the bloom online. People can’t get enough of these smelly freaks.
This one is called Kramer and it’s about 1.5 meters tall though some other corpse flowers
can be twice as tall. The jury is still out on if this one is a good neighbour.
Despite being called a corpse flower, it’s not really a flower, but an inflorescence,
a structure that contains multiple flowers. It’s also not a corpse, but it sure smells like one.
It was as stinky as advertised, a mixture of fish guts and boiled cabbage.
Corpse flowers are really a structure of several flowers. The first European botanist who described
it called it Amorphophallus titanum, which basically means titanic amorphous phallus.
They thought it looked like a man’s... body part.
The nickname Titan Arum is a new invention, and was given to them because the other names
were too scandalous to early 20th century nerds. David Attenboruogh is incorrectly said to have
invented the name titan arum for his 1995 documentary, The Private Life of Plants. But
the earliest reference to the name is from a 1961 edition of the american horticultural magazine.
It’s not a hard name to get to, as arum is the common name for the plants in its family,
and they happen to be the largest arum. The shaft itself doesn’t have any flowers,
but it’s what attracts the flies. It’s called a spadix and releases stinky
chemicals that are irresistible to flesh flies and some beetles. It’s also warm,
which makes its perfume more volatile and helps sell the illusion of being flesh.
When you touch it, it doesn’t feel particularly warm because it’s the same temperature as your
hand. It’s only when you touch the leaves that you can tell the difference in temperature.
The texture of the stalk is a bit like stale bread.
At the base of the stalk there are two rings of flowers: the upper one are bright yellow male
flowers. Insects have to squeeze in and out to get to the stinky bottom and get covered in pollen.
Below the ring of pollen there’s a ring of bright red ovaries that take the pollen to make seeds
Once the insects reach the bottom they look for crevices to lay their eggs.
In the struggle to find the most perfect, safest spot for their eggs,
they unknowingly become pollinators. This is a crucial part of the process,
and basically the whole point of the plant’s evolutionary adaptations,
but it’s seldom seen because the flowers are covered by a leaf skirt called a spathe.
Luckily the greenhouse cut a hole in the leaf to collect pollen. There were no flesh flies but we
got to take a closer look at the ovaries. Cutest ovaries I’ve ever seen!
The titan arum blooms when they’re ready to pollinate, but the female part of the
plant only becomes receptive the following day. This is a neat trick to prevent self-pollination.
It gives insects time to go to other flowers and bring their pollen.
After a day of two of bloom the flower dies and seeds are then spread. If it germinates,
the plant will start out as a corm, spending the first months of its life underground. Then,
after several years, it will slowly grow into the majestic, stinky, cadaver-mimicking,
insect-loving, giant we all know and love. And
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