![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Even a short audience with such spectacular species like the titan arum, the symbol of Sumatra, reminds us of why we must save the rainforests. I imagined what it would be like to discover the titan arum in full flower in its native haunts in the lowland rainforests of Sumatra: after sweat-soaked hours of trudging through the mud and flicking off leeches, to smell something odd-a dead leaf monkey, a rotting tapir?-and then to stumble upon the biological reward of a lifetime. How tragic to think that most of the remaining natural habitat of the titan arum may disappear before this individual, one of the last in its lineage, decides to flower again. This is where an individual plant increases its fitness by breeding with another relative some distance away-what Darwin himself termed as “nature’s urge.” (The flower of our local pawpaw, a species that boasts many close relatives abiding in Sumatra’s rainforests next to the titan arum, gives off the same corpse scent, if much more muted than the titan arum’s inflorescence).įirefly on the Screen Door (cc) slgckgc without the telltale aroma, the titan arum is a spectacular feat of evolution, like the fronds of a leafy sea dragon or the feathers of a peacock, and almost as ephemeral as a firefly’s glow. The titan arum and its cohort of stinkers are cleverer than we think: by drawing in with its rank odor reliable pollen carriers in a dense rainforest, it succeeds in outcrossing. Many tropical plants pollinated by carrion flies and beetles produce flowers that smell like old socks or worse. By the time I arrived there was no evidence of the stench from its giant flower (technically an inflorescence, a cluster of many tiny flowers borne on a stalk) for which the titan arum is most notorious, an odor said to resemble a decomposing corpse. The horticulturists-in-charge, or perhaps the titan arum’s ‘handlers,’ had deliberately placed the titan on a floral throne decorated with lesser plants in the same family (Araceae)-its jealous and more familiar potted cousins, the Anthurium and the Phyllodendron-kneeling below it at the base. When I visited the titan arum on exhibit, I joined a crowd milling around this all-star among aroids, many asking to be photographed next to it. "Corpse Flower" on Display at US Botanic Garden, Washington DC (cc) William Angel out the live webcam here. ![]()
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